The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model isn’t showered in radical praise enough. Not nearly enough. The way they work is very simple and beautiful. This is cool: the Wiki tells us that they were started in the 1960s by mothers in Japan who were concerned about the rise of imported food and the loss of arable land.

Members buy a share at the beginning of the season. They usually run in the neighborhood of $550. For most of the spring, all of the summer and into the first snow, you are treated to between 5 and 18 pounds of farm fresh food every week, basically delivered to you — even in the city. At this point, the Boston area is pretty saturated with CSA options, which means you can find one that’s delivered close to where you live, or where you work, or even have them delivered to your door by a friendly tricycle rider. We recommend finding the dropoff that is most convenient for your schedule.

The often-cited beauty of this model is that the farm gets an infusion of cash in the usually cash-strapped spring and the farmer has a market for all of her produce, so nothing is wasted. There is no middleman between the farmer and consumer, so the farmer receives all the money and the consumer reaps all of the benefits of raw and unprocessed, local, often organic food.

VERY IMPORTANT: Join early, they usually sell out by the middle of May.

The highlights:

• You have a set of materials with which to build your meals every week–no aimless wandering at Scary Grocery Stores
• These veggies are very reasonably priced, considering the weekly breakdown
• You get to learn about new veggies like pea tendrils or winter radishes
• Most farms have ‘pick your own’ options and events, so you can get out of the city for the day and take advantage

A word about meat CSAs:

Meat grown on small, sustainable farms is a luxury none of us can afford to live without. It is infinitely safer, better for our health and for the health of the animals who kindly give their lives for us. It’s also better for the environment; Factory farms have made a very generous contribution to global warming and pollution.

Meat CSAs do not represent the *only* way to get your hands on the good stuff, but they often represent the best deal. (Locally-raised meat is sold at several farmers’ markets now and increasingly at Boston-area shoppes. Also, plenty of farms are happy to arrange bulk orders.) This meat is not cheap. But it’s not because it’s overpriced; it’s because Factory Meat is seriously underpriced, thanks to corporate control of the market and government subsidies.