S.A.D. is like, so last week.
It's a little off topic, but I've been thinking some more about food, and about how, all San Fran Smuggery aside, I derive so much pleasure from following the farm-to-table trail.
So I'm just going to take a second to gush about Eatwell Farm, the CSA we subscribe to in Dixon, CA.
Every two weeks, I get a box full of muddy/imperfect/delicious organic produce and pasture-raised eggs. Behold this week's cornucopia:
Farmer Nigel Walker gave my friend Jenn and me a farm tour last summer. This is a passionate, kind, intelligent man who wants the best for everybody: his customers, his employees, his sons, the earth. His seeds are happily acclimated,
his bees know exactly where to find Home Sweet Home,
and his chickens are masters of Transcendental Meditation.
Walking the fields was like plundering Whole Foods sample tables, Pastoral-style;
we ate the corn off the cob off the stalk,
selected our plums straight from the trees,
filled our cheeks with cherry tomatoes,
invented new exercise regimens for the chickens and piglets (choga and Piglates, respectively),
and got trailed by a suspicious hen.
I was ready to become Farmer Natalie right then and there.
But I know I don't have it in me. Nigel writes a weekly newsletter that accompanies the box, and he has a blog, too. This year, his subscribers have seen him weather a crippling Med Fly quarantine, the cruel murder of his lovely guard dog, Sadie,
and the infestation of his delicious broccoli by bastard aphids. It's a tough profession, full of sweat, mud, manure, bugs and disappointing P&L reports.
The more you read, the more Nigel and his team start to feel like family. You love them and root for them, and want to do whatever you can to help them succeed.
I wish I could say the same for every other business I patronize.
*You might have noticed a vast improvement in photo quality. Jenn took them.
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