Eating locally

My hometown of Pescadero is home to many exciting organic farms. Last year, I enrolled in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) with Green Oaks Farm. This year, my boxes come from Blue House Farm. They share a ranch stand with Pie Ranch (see my review on CHOW.com). Each Saturday, I pick up my box, still warm from the field and say hello to the folks that grow and harvest the food. I stop by Harley Farms and pick up my weekly supply of goat-cheese ricotta. And often, On Saturday, I go to the farmer's market in Half Moon Bay, and buy whatever Orlando and Aaron have to sell that week. As the rest of the country worries about spinach or tomatoes or jalapenos, I rest easy knowing the hands at the farms that grow my food.

This week, I went and picked up my half-share of a grass-fed cow that was raised just miles from here in San Gregorio from the Markegard Family. I now feel a different kind of connection with the meat that I'll eat this year.

Every day, my work at Puente brings me in relationship with dozens of Latino farmworkers.They pick artichokes and brussel sprouts and leeks that are often sold far from here. Many of them are out of work because the high price of fuel is making planting and farming even less profitable for farm owners who then are unable to hire. Even at the best of times, no farmworker makes enough money to live with any comfort in our county. I know firsthand the pain that our failing economy causes in our region and the havoc that it causes in the daily lives of countless men, women and children.

As our country debates its economic policies, I remember that the strawberries I eat, the fennel, the lettuces, the artichokes and beets are inextricably connected both to the fragile lands around me and those that grow my food.

Comments

[Lé]

Have you read Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle? This is what it's all about. Do you know where we can get locally raised eggs???