Green Scene

Food With the
Farmer’s Face on It

Ratatouille, anyone? A New Jersey couple signs on for a Community Supported Agriculture experience they’ll never forget.by John Grossmann

LEEKS, peppers, great-looking eggplants . . .

Then shallots, basil, summer squash . . . like circus clowns out of a tiny car, the produce keeps coming. I reach deeper into our weekly box and add green beans, garlic, hot peppers, grape tomatoes and fingerling potatoes to the growing pile on the kitchen island. And the best is yet to come. A smaller box, about half the size of a case of beer, reveals a multicolored cache of heirloom tomatoes. Today’s farm bounty also includes a heavy, round watermelon.

It’s Sunday, August 26, week 13 in a reality show of sorts, set appropriately enough in the Garden State. The stars are an arugula-to–winter squash cast of organic fruit and vegetables, and a suburban couple who have decided it’s time to eschew the talk and put more locally grown, organic food on our table.

“I’ll make a tomato tart for dinner,” announces my wife, Gail, effectively calling dibs on three or four of the heirloom tomatoes.

Scanning the array of freshly picked items, I see we’ve got everything but onions and sausage for a dish we haven’t made in years. “How about ratatouille?” I offer. “I’ll make a big batch for tomorrow night’s dinner, and we can freeze the rest.” Come late afternoon, knives knock on two chopping boards. Veggies hiss on the stove. The kitchen fills with wonderful smells.

We both like to cook, and live surrounded by cookbooks and cooking magazines. We enjoy browsing at farmer’s markets, buying just-picked food from nearby farms and making up that night’s menu as our bags get heavier going from grower to grower. But we’re busy, and manage these procurement jaunts far less often than we’d like. So when I saw a story in a local paper about a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) organization, now 18 years old, I thought, here’s a perfect way to eat more fresh, locally grown food and do more to help support New Jersey agriculture. We’ve voted for every ballot initiative to preserve open spaces in this, the most densely populated state in the nation. But by joining Honey Brook Organic Farm, we’d have a small but actual stake in one of those spaces—and help keep 60 acres in field crops and a farm family on the land.

There are more than 1,500 CSAs in America, according to an estimate by The Robyn Van En Center for CSA Resources at Wilson College. The concept, born in the 1980s, is simple in theory, exquisite in practice. By signing up for a share of the harvest before planting begins, CSA members participate in both the risks and the bounty of agriculture while sustaining a small farm nearby, a green piece of the landscape.

I’d considered joining one in the past, but none seemed close enough to make the weekly drive to pick up (and sometimes pick your own) vegetables attractive. Honey Brook isn’t close either: It’s an hour-and-a-quarter drive to Pennington, New Jersey. But it’s well-established. It’s the second-oldest of something like two dozen or more CSAs in the state—and, with 2,257 members as of last year, the largest in the nation. That size, for me, provided the deal clincher. Mindful of its most distant members, Honey Brook sends a truck to make deliveries to various drop-off points. When I learned I could pick up our weekly boxed share on Sundays at a health-food store less than 10 miles away, I fired off a check. Then started counting the months, and then days, to the first harvest like a kid anticipating Christmas.

An unusually wet spring (the most rain in April in more than 100 years) affects some of the crops and delays the first distribution of shares until the first weekend of June. In The Local Harvest, their newsletter to members, our farmers, husband and wife Jim Kinsel and Sherry Dudas, tell of flea beetle damage on the bok choy, gray mold on some of the strawberry plants, and a total failure of the carrot crop.

Early in the growing season, concerned about all the rain, and eager to see where my food is coming from and to meet my farmers, I pay a visit to Honey Brook. I turn off a winding country road onto Wargo Road, named for the family that long farmed the land, most recently raising pigs until the mid-1980s. Honey Brook’s fields, fenced high to thwart deer, lie on both sides of the road for a half-mile until the red barn and white farmhouse appear on the right.

Joining me at one of several picnic tables used for member potluck suppers and cooking demonstrations, Dudas tells me she left a job with a state farmlands preservation program in 2002 to manage Honey Brook’s distribution. She and Kinsel married three years later. She has a wild mane of henna hair and a bubbly enthusiasm. He’s equally likable but less gregarious, appearing almost bookish, even in his overalls, behind glasses and a goatee. Kinsel studied abstract math at Rutgers and worked for a time in the actuary department at Prudential Insurance in Newark. Tiring of his desk job, he studied conservation biology before becoming interested in organic farming, which he now pursues with a Jeffersonian dedication and delight. He’s most animated on the subject of a soon-to-be-harvested crop I’ve not heard of.

“We grow hardneck garlic, which develops a flowing stem that uncurls and looks like the steeple on a Russian Orthodox church,” he says. “It’s one of those crops that’s almost like wild forage. You get it once a year. When the scape appears you want to break it off before it flowers, when it’s still very tender and edible. It looks a bit like a pig’s tail.”

These garlic scapes, basically the flower stalks, make their debut in week two—two plastic bags of them in our box, amid the lettuce, kale, snow peas and strawberries. I chop several into inch-long pieces and toss them in the wok before the snow peas in a shrimp stir-fry. They add a bit of color and crunch and, as Kinsel said, a mild garlic flavor.

Over the course of the summer and deep into an unusually warm fall, Honey Brook introduces us to daikon (a Japanese radish) and cabbagelike kohlrabi, and reacquaints us with rutabaga, which I normally walk right by in the produce section. Each boxed-share newsletter provides care and handling information and a recipe. We try and enjoy several suggested dishes. Especially in the most bountiful summer months, putting everything to good use proves no small challenge. Some weeks, the best solution is sharing our bounty with neighbors.

Highlights of our CSA experience? A 2-pounder, bursting with flavor, in one of the heirloom tomato caches. A watermelon that surprised us first with its yellow color, then with its amazing sweetness. Red and orange peppers as flavorful as they were crunchy when eaten raw—hold the blue-cheese dip.

Complaints? None. Just disappointment that the carrots crapped out.

Observations? Trying to use everything (sometimes we fail) makes us think outside the box, so to speak. Our CSA membership, I soon realize, forces changes upon us. With the steady stream of produce coming at us, we necessarily start opening vegetable and vegetarian cookbooks, and when we do add meat or fish to a meal, we necessarily do so in lesser amounts. We eat healthier. The abundance encourages experimentation—watermelon martinis, for example, and often a different version of some dish a week after the first try.

The high point of our first year’s CSA experience (yes, we’ve signed on again) comes during what Honey Brook calls its annual Pig Out. After the last week of produce pickups, the fields are open to members, who can glean what’s left (as long as they donate 10 percent to area food banks). I go with my youngest son the Monday before Thanksgiving. Andrew, a sophomore in college and a vegetarian, is thinking of spending a year working on organic farms in New Zealand after he graduates, so he leaps at my invitation—cold, dreary weather notwithstanding. The fields are muddy, and on this, the last day of the Pig Out, pretty picked over. We search hard in the beheaded broccoli rows for a few decently topped stalks, then cross Wargo Road to where we see a few others bent over. We fill a canvas bag with greens and a second one with beets.

I’m happy for the time with my son. But I’m just as pleased that he takes special interest in making a roasted beet soup for our Thanksgiving dinner.

Taking Root

Community Supported Agriculture seems such a classic win-win arrangement that it’s easy to imagine it has deep roots in American soil. In fact, those defining words and the nation’s first such shared crops were sown only two decades ago. Independently of each other, two differently motivated, though conceptually similar, agricultural experiments made their debuts in the fall of 1985 and the summer of 1986, respectively: Indian Line Farm near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Temple-Wilton Community Farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, some 80 miles to the northeast. Both benefited from ideological cross-pollination from Europe. Both continue to this day.

Indian Line Farm was consumer-driven. “We were not the gardeners, we were consumers who wanted locally grown vegetables,” recalls John Root, an original founding member. The spark for the idea, he says, came from Jan Vander Tuin, a well-traveled American who became intrigued by consumer-producer food alliances he’d encountered in Europe and Japan. A local landowner named Robyn Van En offered her farm, and they all went in to hire one gardener at $7 an hour and pledged $350 for equal shares of what they dubbed Community Supported Agriculture. Van En, until her death in 1997, served as a CSA evangelist and historian, grounding the growing movement in a similar Japanese phenomenon from the 1960s: consumer-farmer arrangements called “teikei,” a word that literally means “partnership” but philosophically translates as “food with the farmer’s face on it.”

Temple-Wilton Community Farm started not with consumers seeking a farmer, but with farmers seeking supportive consumers: “Three of us in search of a way to do something bigger, more socially interesting,” recalls venerable “vegetable grower” Anthony Graham, who will this year oversee his 23rd CSA season, probably the most seasons of any American grower. Joining him were a local dairyman named Lincoln Geiger, whose cows still provide milk year-round, and a progressive, peripatetic German farmer named Trauger Groh, who’d done something similar overseas. The trio invited interested families to several gatherings, announced they’d need $23,000 to produce the first year’s array of nearly three dozen vegetables, and asked their new agricultural partners to pledge (and re-pledge) what they felt was an appropriate share of the costs until they met the mark. Ultimately, they netted $30,000.

The first year, they had about as many family memberships as varieties of vegetables. Nowadays, the waiting list exceeds membership, which is capped at about 100. “That’s my comfort level. Any more, and I find I’m spending so much time at my desk that it’s not fun anymore,” says Graham.

“The town is really awake to what we’re doing,” he adds. “And they love that at least a chunk of Abbott Hill, which is getting so developed [with homes], is going to stay looking the way it does, with cows walking across the road twice a day to get to the other pasture.”

— J.G.