As I was in Columbus, Ohio recently doing publicity for Fellowship of the Dice, I came up with this new idea for blog posts. There are some abbreviations or acronyms that mean different things, so why not do a comparison between the two?
This all started, of course, with my parents. No, not like that. A while ago, my mom e-mailed Tom and I, saying that she's getting too old now to remember everyone's birthdays and holidays and whatnot, and she proposed getting us a share in a CSA - community supported agriculture, or a farm-share. How it basically works is that you pay a local farm a quarterly fee and in return you get a box of their fresh, seasonal, organic crop each week. What is in the box varies depending on the season. The upsides of this are pretty obvious. With the food being grown locally, it spends less time in transit getting to you, which means that not only are they more flavorful but also you're getting more of the nutritious value from the food. (Also, with the The bulk of the participating CSA farms are also all organic, so no nasty pesticides, chemicals or additives. This sometimes means that the food that arrives may not be as pretty as what you can get from the store, but it's a hell of a lot more flavorful. And considering some of the scary news lately about what is in some of our imported foreign food, getting stuff locally just starts to make sense on both health and security levels.
As you can imagine, Tom and I were pretty excited by this prospect, and we accepted this. It started a couple weeks ago, and I have to say, the whole CSA thing is pretty damn awesome. Every week, we go to a drop-off point nearby, pick up that week's box of fruit & veggies, and start diggin' in. We've had green beans, yellow beans, humongous grapefruit, blueberries, rosemary, squash, salad mix, carrots, cantaloupe, onions, beets, red potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, radishes, lemons, green onions, and arugula. While it does take out a bit of our spontaneity in regards what we'll make, having the CSA makes things a whole mess easier. Now when we go to the store, we can stock up on other food items and leave the veggies alone. A couple cans of crushed tomatoes and some veggie sausage and boom, we have pasta sauce. Just get olive oil and voila, instant salad. We also get ideas from all the stuff we had. Tom made some great carrot & zucchini muffins the other day, and when Tom and I had dinner with Mitch & Jen, I put together this yummy avocado & grapefruit salad, since we had these ginormous grapefruits in the house. Needless to say, it was delicious.
One huge upside to doing the CSA here in lovely Southern California is that, unlike other parts of the U.S., this goes all year long. So, not only do we have some lovely fall fruits and veggies to look forward to (like eggplant, pumpkins, tomatoes, tomatillos, apples and pears), we will be getting stuff during the winter. So, around the holidays, Tom and I should be flush in avocados, winter squash, and oranges.
Now before all this, when I heard the term CSA, I always thought of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. This is an excellent satire, done as a faux BBC documentary about America if the South won the Civil War and slavery was still overt government policy. It has great interviews with fake experts about how Lincoln was tried as a war criminal, how "Dixie" became the national anthem and how Canada became America's biggest enemy, as American liberals fled north to escape. Interspersed throughout the film are fake commercials for highly racist businesses, like "N****rhair Cigarettes", and the American Department of Racial Purity, where citizens can report anyone who's "passing". The double whammy with these spots are that (A) they are very darkly funny and (B) they are based on actual American products that are no longer in existence (though some are a bit too recent for comfort).
C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America is one of the few movies that I've rented that I've watched twice in the same day. I first watched it with Tom, and then later that night with our upstairs neighbors Shane & Mitch. It's a movie that packs a punch -- what starts off as a bit of an alternate reality lark starts to become far more resonant and scary as it shows the C.S.A. coming into modern day, with a lot of parallels to what's going on right now in America. It's a definite must-watch.
So, in the battle between CSA and C.S.A., it's hard to say which one is better. They're both pretty awesome and rather nutritious. The best option would be to to put together some great organic appetizers and nosh on them while watching the movie. The winner in this battle? You.
Recent Comments