Before signing up for our CSA, I imagined a Lucy Show in the kitchen, where I was stuffing all manor of recipes with zucchini, just to be overrun the following week with eggplant or tomatoes. While cooking from the CSA basket does take some management, it's mostly fun googling the week's vegetable combinations to find new recipes to try. The Fox Creek assortment is fairly pedestrian (no exotic greens or asian roots) which leaves me free to experiment on new things at the farmers market.
One nagging question I had, though, came from a fellow shareholder who's had a lot of health problems and asked if the vegetables from Fox Creek were organic. Hmmm. Because they hadn't mentioned organic, I decided to find out.
I picked a beautiful Saturday to drive out to Gallupville and take advantage of the U-Pick garden, which is part of my CSA membership. While there, I ran into Raymond, who explained that Fox Creek did farm using organic methods but that they hadn't applied for certification. I was reminded of a passage in The Omnivore's Dilemma, where famous-farmer Joel Salatin said that, given a choice, you should start with local food rather than big-box organic. If you buy local, you can always stop by the farm and simply ask about their farming practices. Plus you get to take flowers home!