Local Appeal

An urban girl signs up to support a nearby farm and discovers that even turnips can be worth eating.

By Dayna Macy

It's Friday, farm-box day in my house. I grab my box of fresh produce from a local pickup place and open it. Broccoli rabe—hallelujah! Blue kuri squash—beautiful! Onions—useful! Turnips! Uh—turnips?

As a member of Full Belly Farm, a community-supported agriculture (CSA) farm located in the Capay Valley, about 100 miles from my home in Berkeley, California, I'm often cooking something I've never seen at a store or at least never thought to buy. I give Full Belly $15 a week and, in return, receive a box of wildly fresh fruits and vegetables of the farmer's choosing. Each week, I hope to get what I love: stone fruit, chard, or corn, depending on the season. What I don't love—parsnips, rutabagas, and the like—well, I hope the crops won't be too bountiful.

Try as I might to be open minded, I think of turnips as a subsistence crop, a tuber whose main culinary claim to fame is that it was once eaten to prevent scurvy. But never mind. Turnips are what I've got; turnips are what I'll eat. I plow through my cookbooks and find a decent-sounding soup recipe. I'm betting that the ingredients, which include butter, onions, celery, apples, and curry powder, could transform even the most humdrum root vegetable into something edible. They do. And I won't have to worry about scurvy.

When you get a CSA box, you have to figure out what to do,says Judith Redmond, one of Full Belly's four owners. It can be an exciting and creative process.

Indeed. For me, the unanticipated gift of a CSA box is that food is no longer a commodity but a creative challenge. No more ratatouille in the springtime—tomatoes and eggplant are summer crops. You cook with what grows in this place and time. Your box gave you turnips? Go figure it out.

Local Motion

When I first heard of weekly veggie boxes, I thought the idea sounded cool. I figured I'd be supporting a small farm (indisputably a good cause), I'd learn what grows nearby, and I'd be introduced to stuff I wouldn't normally buy. I didn't know how profoundly I was departing from the standard practices of our food supply.

A tomato can travel thousands of miles before it lands in a grocery cart. Most often, it's a hybrid that was bred to survive the trip rather than to taste great, and it may have been picked before its prime, in order to last days if not weeks in the supermarket. It used up plenty of the earth's resources as it was packaged, refrigerated, and trucked from farm to distribution point to store. Poor tomato. Poor you.

Those turnips in my box traveled just 100 miles (about the limit for most CSA produce), and they were an heirloom variety chosen for outstanding flavor. They were harvested about 24 hours before I ate them; plus their arrival at my house put money in the hands of a farmer who, by cutting out middlemen and the costs of transportation, just might stay in business. (Nationwide, farmers typically receive 19 cents of each dollar a consumer spends on food. For a CSA farm, the number is close to 100 percent.) On top of all that, the turnips prompted me to rethink dinner!

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