Author Archives: crunchymetromom

Adventures in CSA – going off the rails…

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So, I’ve been rubbish about posting on a regular basis. Excuses, excuses, yadda yadda. Let’s just say my motivation has hit somewhat of a low. That has something to do with being at the tail end of two kids with back-to-back bouts of pneumonia (the only fun part being that the medicine they were put on is what we now call PRINCESS SPARKLY MEDS and it IS magical). I’ve also been really busy at work, so by the time I get home, the kids are fed & in bed and the kitchen’s back in order, it’s all I can do just to check twitter & fb and maybe score a few rounds against those egg-stealing pigs before I go face-plant on my bed.

All of this has taken some of the steam out of the whole cooking local effort, since it makes it really hard to plan for heavily locally-sourced meals when you’re just trying to keep your head above water. I know very few people who manage to do a lot of cooking from scratch throughout the week where A) both adults work full-time day jobs out of the house, and B) there’s at least one child living in the house. I have a brontosaurus-sized bone to pick with folks like Anthony Bourdain, who stick their nose up in the air at anything boxed or canned; we don’t all have the luxury of taking hours to make dinner each night. Sometimes, even one hour is more than we can muster. On any given day, I’m home just under 45 minutes from when we want dinner on the table. That doesn’t give a lot of leeway.

That’s why I was really annoyed when I listened to this piece on NPR, because it still missed part of the point. While the chef is preparing a risotto that’s inexpensive to pull together, there’s no mention of how *quickly* it can come together. If a risotto takes no less than 45 minutes (on a good day, and when working with a simple recipe), how on earth is it something that can be managed by an exhausted parent, coming home after the end of a long workday, trying to manage kids while making this inexpensive-yet-not-boxed meal?

So, there’s a part of me that says that this is unrealistic. That’s not to say that I’m giving up. It just means that I’m trying to be realistic about it. We have a food crisis on this planet. For starters, there’s plenty of food, but it’s not being distributed to everybody who needs it. Rich nations get fat, and poor nations are starving. That’s just insane.  Second, we have people who can’t make ends meet in our own neighborhoods – regardless of how “rich” or “poor” your neighborhood is. That’s really horrifyingly insane. [Everybody, go open a new tab in your browser and donate to your local food bank, now, please.] And, in a country where we should really be able to manage things better, we have this concept of a “food desert”, where there’s just crap access to places where you can get affordable, fresh foods. [Feel free to check out the USDA Food Desert Locator, to see how close you live to a food desert…we’re astonishingly close to one – where I’m astonished because we live within a 10 minute drive of four good grocery stores.]

And there’s BPA in canned tomato soup, and there’s arsenic in apple juice, and OMFG it’s time to just go back to an agrarian society because we’re just industrializing ourselves into the grave.

OKAY. TIME TO GET IT TOGETHER AGAIN.

There’s a point at which you kind of have to accept that you can’t be everything to everybody. Similarly, there’s only so much you can buy if you don’t have unlimited sums of cash. And, you can’t do everything you want to do without unlimited time. These are all just truths. It’s just how it is. That doesn’t mean you can’t strive to be a good person in all that you do, that you can’t try to squeeze the best value out of your budget, and that you can’t be efficient with your time so that you can do as many of the things you want as possible. But it DOES mean that some trade-offs are required. For me, that includes knowing that I’m not always doing exactly what I wish I could be doing in my kitchen. We did bake a ton over the long weekend last week – and that was great. But I have squash sitting in my fridge, taking up serious space, plaintively crying out, When will you eat us?! I will get to you my pretties, just give me time.

Patience, in all things. Gotta be better about that myself.

More on week 2 and week 3 of the CSA later. And now…off to take dd to a playdate down the street.

Black Friday BLACKOUT

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Normally, I try not to go out too much on Black Friday – I realize that we’re encouraged to start our holiday season shopping as early as possible, so retailers can drain what’s remaining of our disposable income – but I often end up hitting a sale or two. I’m NOT the one who goes out for the sales that require standing in line at 4am or queuing up endlessly in a sea of hundreds, hoping to shove through the scrum to get to the two laptops that are actually at the price advertised in the sale flyer. Still, I haven’t ever really sworn off Black Friday: until now.

Enter Target – a store where I shop early and often. While I was shocked to see a gigantic sign on the side of a Kohl’s that advertised the store opening at 1am (really people? 1 AM?!), I was horrified to hear that Target was opening at 12:01am. Even worse, other stores are opening even earlier – backing Black Friday up into Thanksgiving day.

It was at this point that I just snapped. I won’t boycott Target; I’d much rather boycott the entire day. Here, you have merchants in an arms race to see who can open earlier and earlier until the Thanksgiving holiday turns into a quick turkey sandwich at 2am before you have to rush out to meet the shoppers who want to get the deals before they watch the Cowboys beat the snot out of some poor, unsuspecting team.

So, I decided to make my own Black Friday special: the Black Friday BLACKOUT.

I want to encourage everyone to skip the stores. Skip the sales. Show merchants that you want them to return to some semblance of sanity and treat their employees like REAL PEOPLE DESERVING OF A HOLIDAY by not shopping. Then, instead of heading to the mall, either pop open your laptop or head to the grocery store. Donate at least $10 to your local food pantry. Why? Well, any time of year is a good time to donate to a food pantry, but winter is a particularly hard time for a lot of families to cope, especially when it’s a choice between food or presents. I don’t know whether I’ll have time to leave the house on Friday, since I’m deliberately skipping the sales and choosing to bake and hang out with the family. If I make it out, I’m only going to the grocery store to get canned and boxed goods to donate. Otherwise, I’ll just donate online. I’m a particular fan of the Greater Boston Food Bank.

Want to join me? It’s easy.

Here’s what you do:

1. Agree not to take part in Black Friday madness – vote with your feet!

2. Promise to donate either food or $$ (min. $10, if you can manage it) to your local food pantry. Note that many houses of worship also run food pantries, and they can direct you to others as well. Otherwise, just hit up Google Maps and search on “food pantry near” your town.

I’m not saying don’t shop for holiday gifts. I’m not saying that you should snub local merchants, either. My point is that these retailers are freaking out and forcing people to work insane hours in the service of greed, not the “holiday season”. If enough of us choose NOT to participate in Black Friday madness, maybe they’ll change their minds. I’ve worked plenty of retail in my day, and the thought of having to skip Thanksgiving with my family because it’s either that or lose my job…well, that’s just crap, and I refuse to support anyone doing that to their employees.

Who’s with me?

Adventures in CSA (winter week 1): value shift

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First off, I know this is a long-delayed post. Sorry. Between being distracted by all that was going on with Penn State (my alma mater) and work and the kids and…just about everything else…by the time I got time to myself, I had just enough energy to play Angry Birds, and writing was just not in the cards.

Second, here’s where things start to downshift some in terms of value, and I’m starting to see that. We’ve been thrown off some in the last few weeks thank to a blizzard prompting a clean-out of some portions of the fridge, appointments that have screwed up our dinner planning…all kinds of things. And this is the big issue that I have with the fresh ingredients that you get from a CSA: what are you supposed to do when you have diminishing time to prepare ingredients from scratch? So, our use of the CSA hasn’t been as high as it could’ve been lately. And this is where things get to be lower value for us, because we’re not getting the use of the items the way we should (our fault) and we’re not saving a ton of money due to the type of items that are included.

This hasn’t soured me on the idea of the CSA, but it does make me wonder whether I would go in on a winter share again.

Here’s the breakdown on the prices for week 1’s box:

Winter CSA Week 1
Weight
(lb)		 Grocery Store Unit Price
(per lb)		 Grocery Store Total Item Cost
Purple Kale* 0.85 $1.29 $1.10
Bok Choi 3.25 $1.29 $4.19
Comice Pears 0.87 $2.99 $2.59
Carrots 1.51 $0.99 $1.49
Red Potatoes 1.09 $1.49 $1.62
Parsnips 0.81 $2.49 $2.02
Butternut Squash 2.54 $0.79 $2.01
Yukon Gold Potatoes 0.96 $0.99 $0.95
Macintosh Apples 2.57 $1.19 $3.06
Yellow Onion 0.30 $1.49 $0.44
Grocery Store Total Cost $19.48
Winter CSA Week 1 Savings (Deficit) ($0.52)
Notes:
* Items were not available; closest equivalent was used.

Some of the lower financial value has to be in the items that are included; potatoes, apples, etc. tend to be less expensive items. Amusingly, carrots are the only item that I’ve been the price stay static at $0.99/lb throughout the entire run of the fall CSA and thus far through the winter CSA. Given how other things seems to shift, I wonder why it is that carrots remain virtually fixed in place, price-wise?

I’m wondering whether others find that their winter CSA programs are worth what they put into them, or if it’s just ours that seems to be of lower financial value. It may also be where we are – what you can get in a box in Southern New England during the late fall and early winter may just be stuff that’s less expensive than what you can get in the Southwest or Southeast?