Instead, we have slugs.
I don't know how many slugs I washed out of the CSA stems and leaves this week. But with every slug down the drain, I found myself thinking about the short line between my food source and our table.
It reminds me of this quote from the book, Plenty:
Organic vegetables are frequently the end products of intensive production methods, and end up on your plate after, say, crossing the continent by diesel truck and passing through a plant that washes 26 million servings of lettuce each week.
My fresh market salad was different. It was human scale. I could relate each item not only to its place but to its specific farm and to the faces of those farmers. Greens from the Langley Organic Growers; eggs from the Forstbauer family farm; garlic scapes from a shy man named Albert. The foods that overflowed our big glass bowl were not only the flavors of spring, but of this particular spring, this unique year with its hard rain and rare glory of sun (48).
Human scale. I love that part of the CSA concept. Our CSA box absolutely reflects the flavors and characteristics of this particular spring - slugs included (though I do not speak about their flavor!). I love being able to connect my lettuce to a farmer with a name and to a place with an address.
In fact, this farmer grows my lettuce on the (very) small farm that my parents owned when I was in high school. I can even connect my well known love of dirt digging to the many hours spent hand digging a garden plot on that property so many seasons ago. It was work then. But somehow it was work that gave shape to my soul.
Seasonal Food and Thought. Indeed.
The apparent contradiction is that, although we abhor slugs supping on the tender seedlings and landscape plants in our yard, we don't mind seeing them in our CSA greens. They are a sign that we will probably not be ingesting some questionable chemicals. Further, we like supplementing offerings from the CSA and from our own garden with produce from the weedy farm just down the road from us. The interloping weeds there are a similar sign.
ReplyDeleteIts also satisfying to see that short line turn into a circle as today's scraps get composted into next years produce from our own garden spots.
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