I was going to post about Sunday night’s salad today–but in light of recent events, it will have to wait. It all started Sunday evening (after the salad) as I was feeling smugly satisfied for having made such a healthy, veggie-filled dinner. That was when my curiousity got the better of me, and I decided that Food Inc. would make an enjoyable (or at least informative) after-dinner movie experience.

I knew full-well what I was in for. Actually, its surprising that my movie choice wasn’t vetoed on account of the rants caused by my reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, a couple years ago. Perhaps it would have been better that way.

Indeed, In Defense of Food basically scared me away from the interior of the grocery store. My shopping trips these days almost always take me around the perimeter of the grocery store: produce, dairy, fish, and occasionally meat. My rule about the rest of the store is, if it doesn’t come in a can (tomatoes and chickpeas), a jar (jam and pickles) or sack (flour, sugar, pasta etc.)–I’m not buying it. This seemed to work pretty well for weeding out the high-fructose corn-syrup masquerading as nutritive food…however, as Food Inc. explained, leaving little to the imagination, high-fructose corn-syrup was just the tip of the iceberg.

As I listened to the stories of more and more farmers being bought out/bullied/beat up by giant corporations trying to convince the world that we really only needed one genetic strain of soybean to feed everyone (coincidentally, it was the strain that they had patented) the guilt started to set in. Ok, so I wasn’t buying the Twinkies in aisle 3, but I was buying the bananas in aisle 1, which probably didn’t come from the local farmer down the way. Then I realized I didn’t even *know* what was in season anymore. Clearly, it was time to seek out some serious remedial vegetable education.

There are several local farms in the greater seattle area, but getting to one to buy ones weekly produce is no small task, and unlike Toronto, where they all congregate at the St. Lawrence Market once a week, there is no central market (well, there’s Pike Place, but Pike is mostly an overpriced tourist trap, and as much as I love organic produce and supporting local agriculture, I can’t afford Pike). Then I remembered the produce box.

I first heard of the concept of a “produce box” in Nige’s Kitchen Diaries. It sounded like a brilliant idea. Once a week, a box of fresh seasonal, locally grown produce shows up at your door, and you get to come up with creative ways to cook it, and the profits go direct to the farmers. Better still, it saves you wandering aimlessly around the grocery store trying to find culinary inspiration from an expanse of sterile, season-less plastic wrapped vegetables fruits imported from all over the world.

Now, if anywhere in the US was likely to have produce boxes, its the Pacific Northwest. In fact, a google search quickly revealed that there were 10+ CSAs (Community Supported Agricultures) which delivered weekly boxes in the Seattle area alone. As with most things on the internet, it was mind-numbing. Finally, after an evening of (not so) exhaustive research, we settled on New Roots organics, a CSA which bought produce from a couple local farms, and delivered boxes once a week. We liked it because it didn’t require a season-long commitment, like other farms did, but felt more farmers-markety than other places, in that the boxes were put together based on what was in season, rather than customer preference (great for those of us who have been known to spend an hour wandering around the produce section, trying to decide what they want).

And so I did it. I signed up. Either this thursday or next, a box of local green goodness should be appearing on my doorstep, which, in and of itself is very exciting. The fact that it saves me having to carry flavorless grocery store produce home on my bike at least once a week, is equally, if not more exciting.

I guess that means that watching Food Inc, depressing as it was, wasn’t such a bad idea after all. However, the search for a decent, local, organic butcher continues–any suggestions are welcome.