Eat better and cheaper, and support your local farmers too

Nothing compares to getting fresh, locally grown produce and unique, Pittsburghproducts — and, while you’re doing so, getting to know your local food producers and supporting small businesses.

Farmer’s markets are the unusual American institution that appeals to people of very different politics. They give people on the left a way to support the small, local and personal against the large, distant and corporate. They give people on the right a way to support the creative, hard-working and entrepreneurial.

The Post-Gazette’s Gretchen McKay’s roundup of farmer’s markets, from this Thursday, includes a map of farmers markets around the region.

Farms offering community supported agriculture programs have the same advantages as farmers markets, though sadly they’re much less well-known. Like farmers markets, CSAs appeal to people across the political spectrum. Both provide food likely to be as good or better than what you find at most grocery stores. And both help sustain a crucial but threatened institution, the small farm.

In a CSA, you agree to buy a weekly selection of vegetables and fruits, usually delivered to a local home whose owners have offered it as a pick-up spot. Customers can choose how much they want to get each week, and can often rule out the produce they don’t want. Since the food varies over the course of the growing season, getting the delivery is a bit like Christmas — and connects you to the natural seasonality of what the land produces.

They can change your relation to food and your understanding of the world around you. “We had one of these for most of last year, and it totally changed the way I relate to my food,” a young mother wrote. “Vegetables went from being a necessary evil to a way of feeling wonder and gratitude. [My son] learned about what was in season, and where it came from, and who grew it. And he got to see me cackling gleefully about a lot of candy cane beets.”

Many provide organic vegetables and fruits, or partner with others to offer mushrooms, cheeses, ciders, milk. Some send weekly emails with ideas of how to prepare the week’s offerings. For more on this, see the Post-Gazette’s Virginia Phillips’ “CSAs, 2.0” from earlier this month.

Supporting local farms, at farmer’s markets and through CSAs, is one good thing everyone can agree on during this political silly season.