“Isn’t it nice?” I offer to my supper companions, “to see our beautiful horses right while we’re eating? I feel like I’m on a Kentucky horse farm, with rolling bluegrass vistas.” I sweep my arm dramatically towards the view, the rigged up electric fence, the lawn straggling down to the pond, the three horses, one of whom is relieving herself at the moment. “Oh, huh,” he answers. “I was thinking it was more like a cheesy bed and breakfast.”

We were ready. We had spent five years apprenticing at farms and CSAs. We had worked a lot, read a lot, questioned a lot, even groused a little, and in the process, learned everything we needed to know about CSA farming, or so we thought. Why, we could even explain in twenty-five words (or more) to puzzled family, friends, and neighbors just what a CSA was: