Jun 17, 20202 min read

Bring on the heat! {Week 5 CSA}

Updated: Jun 17, 2020

Despite the sweaty farm work that 95 degree days present, we're more than ready for some sweltering afternoons. What they mean for our crops make them entirely worth it.

Our region’s hot and dry summers make the slow growth of spring truly pop from the ground. Our outdoor crops will be racing upward in the next few weeks and we’re excited for the diversity of flavors, colors, and textures to come. Truth be told, we get a little tired of spring’s healthy greens right around this time!

Eating seasonally in our area is more challenging in this way. But the benefits for our bodies and the planet of local (and thus, seasonal) eating are hard to ignore: from decreasing the amount of fuel burned in transporting food to the incredible discoveries of

coordinations between soil microbes and our own internal flora. Indeed, our

bodies communicate with our environments in ways we’re only beginning to understand

and it makes sense that they prepare to consume foods from our surroundings (by using

a similar microbial landscape for nutrient digestion). Sigh. Nature never ceases to impress.

The thing is, the impossibility of eating seasonally in our area is an illusion. And likely one based in our attachment to the conveniences of agriculture. The forests surrounding us are a bounty of nutrition, for herbivores and omnivores alike, despite very few of us with the skills to identify and prepare it all. Agriculture affords us the security (well, mostly) and convenience of predicting our food supply, but it also requires incredible contraptions and energy to produce sufficiently in the colder, darker months of the year. Seasonal eating in our area is absolutely possible, but not without tremendous effort.

Eating locally can be a fun challenge, rewarding us in good health and likely some improved

skills (in the kitchen and the forest). At Prema, we’ve become masters in diverse salad

preparations. :) It can be a provocative choice to keep your diet local. You might find yourself

foaming at the mouth for bananas. But it can also offer deep attunement with your

surroundings. Luckily for us, California is only a hop, skip, and jump away anyhow... (and we might just have some greenhouse banana varieties in our crosshairs for the years to come).