(Note: This blog entry was originally posted at One Box A Week back in July 2009. This was my opening post after signing up for the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) project. I’m posting it to he front of this blog as I think it reveals a bit of my skeptical thinking pattern — something I haven’t talked a lot on this blog about yet but intend to — and also how it reveals how economics became a bit more important to me this year. When I started the CSA, I didn’t care so much about the money. In October, I did.)
Those that know me outside of the office know that I am a skeptic. I don’t really take many claims at face value and that is especially true when so-called authorities in the ‘wellness biz’ make them. Like most skeptics I feel that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” so when wellness practitioners suggest that I do something or another, or buy something or another and everything will be wonderful , I will be healthy, or I will save money, I tend to take it all with a grain of salt. Enter Farmer Donna of Morning Song Farm.
Our company is blessed with a corporate culture that promotes wellness. We are also blessed with a HR team that is passionate about the environment. This often results in various speakers coming to the office who cause me to run to the research in order to investigate their claims. (For those in the office reading this and wondering about the score: Green Tea, YES; the Master Cleanse, NO.) So you would think that I would be skeptical when I when I showed up to Farmer Donna’s seminar on organic farming. Not really. I had been exposed to organic foods since I was a teenager (a funny story for another blog post) so I didn’tneed convincing that organic was preferable wherever possible and affordable. It was the whole CSA part that threw me. I had never heard of it before.
Only moments after Farmer Donna’s spiel began was I to feel my skeptic hat firmly in place. Turns out she was not just an educator that day but also a salesman! Anyone who has ever been approached by someone selling water purifiers, motivational tapes, weight loss shakes, vitamins, magnets that relieve pain, (you get the drift), knows that salesmen who are also ‘educators’ can be a dangerous proposition. And, in fact, Farmer Donna’s spiel did contain a few of the classic fear statements salesmen use to kick us into immediate action. While prior speakers at work have told us that our water supply is slowly poisoning us, Donna’s version had more to do with vegetable seeds going extinct and the harrowing prospect of worldwide famine should anything happen to the loss of heirloom seed inventory.
That said, the pleasant surprise for me here was that there are plenty of good reasons to sign up for a CSA program that had nothing to do with responding to fear statements. Similarly, you didn’t even need to consider the “dollar saved” proposition (again, another good future blog topic):
- Doesn’t it make sense to know the person growing your food?
- Exposure to knew vegetables and fruits you wouldn’t ordinarly try.
- A chance to visit the farm.
- Produce picked one day prior.
- Higher degree of credibility regarding the “organic” label.
- Just doing your part to sustain local farming, keep money local, and support a distribution system that doesn’t burn a lot of fuel shipping things cross country.
So, no extensive research needed. I’m in!
