Find a Local CSA
If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.
You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.
It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.
Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.
Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.
However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.
It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.
They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.
I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.
The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.
anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.
also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie