This morning, Kim, Fiona and I went over to a local farmers market. We had signed up with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. For the next eighteen weeks, we will stop by every Saturday and pick up a box of locally grown fruits and vegetables.

It was a beautiful day. We picked up our box of produce, and then supplemented it with some other food. One farmer was selling fresh picked peas and we bought some of them and some strawberries. We then sat down underneath a tree and shelled and ate some of the peas and ate a few of the strawberries.

I told Fiona of picking peas when I was a kid. We had plenty of pea plants and would spend the early morning picking peas and spend the late morning shelling them. My mother would then freeze them for the winter. If we were lucky, we would get to go swimming in the afternoon.

Fiona said hello to everyone that showed up with a dog and asked if she could pat the dogs. She stopped by and patted a goat and Kim picked up some ribs from a farm in Northern Connecticut. It was pretty close to an idyllic Saturday morning.

For me, this gets to the sort of sacrifices that we need to make in order to live a more sustainable life style. Instead of eating frozen peas grown in Renville, MN and shipped 1,300 miles, not including stops for processing, we ate fresh peas that had probably been picked this morning in Middlebury, CT before their 50-mile trip to the farmers market.

The ribs we will eat this evening will have traveled about as far, coming down from Ox Hollow Farm in Roxbury. However, the ribs may have traveled further than that. Doing a lookup on Ox Hollow Farm, I see that they show some of their livestock at the BigE. Who knows, perhaps I met the pig I am about to eat part of last fall.

Yes, it does take a little more time. It takes time to go to the farmers market with the family. It takes time to shell and enjoy the peas, yet it is time well spent. If you want to deal with climate change, the problems of factory farms, how farm workers are treated, and a myriad of other concerns, a good starting point is your local farmer’s market. Then, a good follow up is getting a few friends to go as well.