September 23, 2009: This week’s featured fruits and vegetables are: broccoli, a leafy green (collard or kale or lettuce or salad), potatoes, winter squash (which should be used right away, delicata winter squash (the weather was wet – no storage for this one), sweet peppers, hot peppers, apples, eggplant and beans.

Comment overheard at the Sandy Spring pickup site last week: “it’s the cabbage that ate New York!”

ANNOUNCEMENT: The last pick up is September 30. Please return all boxes by that time. If you are joining us for the Fall CSA, there will an informational email going out around September 25. If you are not joining us for Fall and want to come back for the Spring/Summer 2010 season, please check the website at JOIN by early December. Your money will be due in January. Thanks for supporting healthy, local food.

Olney Farmers and Artists Market – live music by Soulpajamas

Need a reason to visit Olney Farmers and Artists Market? Two of your CSA organizers, Dan & Erin Johnson (Soulpajamas) will be performing at the market this Sunday (Sept 27), from 10-11am. Stop by and say hello. We recently blogged about CSA at our Soulpajamas music web site.

Recipes: Green and Gold Experiments

Ah, early fall – the time when winter squashes are coming in and leafy greens are coming back around. There’s some great eating this time of year.

I began thinking about winter squashes last week; my garden had produced several, and I was trying to integrate them with our CSA produce. Those who (like me) may still be trying to make use of last week’s cabbage-the-size-of-Toledo may be interested in this recipe I found for Cabbage and Eggplant with Acorn Squash – it looks very tasty.

As for this week’s fare, there are lots of greens/squash recipes that are friendly to a variety of either greens or squashes. For a first course, one could try this Kale and Roasted Vegetable Soup. Pasta lovers may enjoy either this Acorn Squash and Kale over Penne or this Whole Wheat Lasagna with Butternut Squash and Kale. And this Squash and Kale Risotto could incorporate a host of other CSA vegetables as well, as is mentioned in the recipe – though as always with risottos, I recommend cheating with a pressure cooker, as detailed in this recipe for Kale and Potato Risotto, another great choice for this week.

Again, don’t be put off by the particular leafy green or the particular squash mentioned in these recipes – collards or Swiss chard can usually be substituted for kale, and many of the winter squashes have similar enough textures to work in most of these recipes. And the spirit of experimentation is never out of place in a CSA.

Enjoy your green and gold experiments!

Food For Thought: The SUV in the Pantry

According to Thomas Starrs, we use about as much energy to grow, process, and deliver our food as to power our homes or fuel our cars.

Starrs captured my attention from the title onward in his 2005 essay “The SUV in the Pantry”. He explores the statistic that it takes about 10 fossil fuel calories to produce each food calorie in the average U.S. diet. If so, for a family of four, that’s almost 34,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or the equivalent of more than 930 gallons of gasoline. (The average U.S. household annually consumes electricity equivalent to about 1,070 gallons of gasoline).

Starrs cites one study that estimates that if all humanity ate the way people in the U.S. eat, we would exhaust all known fossil fuel reserves in 7 years.

Industrialized agriculture also contributes over 20% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, including more than 20% of the carbon dioxide, 55% percent of the methane, and 65% of the nitrous oxide, according to Starrs.

Because much of the energy in this food equation comes from processing or packaging food, or from eating high on the food chain, Starrs makes three simple suggestions:

1. Eat lower on the food chain: more fruits and vegetables, less meat and fish. If you do eat meat, avoid meat from feedlots or factory pens, since that meat takes more energy to raise.
2. Eat more fresh foods and fewer processed foods: fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and other less-processed foods (in general, the more packaging, the more processing).
3. Buy local. Trucking, shipping, or (worst) flying foods in adds a lot to the energy costs.

Buying organic can also make a difference, as the the Organic Consumers Association rightly points out in their reprinting of this article (bottom of the page), given that conventional farming is more energy-intensive than organic farming. They also enlarge upon the statistics and calculations that Starrs makes use of in his article, and provide some interesting links to further resources.