i’m at my internship and everyone just went into a meeting which means I’m just going to hang out here for a while, I guess.  it’s for a local political campaign but I won’t want to say for whom because this isn’t a private blog and I’m pretty sure you could copy and paste this sentence into google and find this. 

when I woke up this morning at 8am I made goat cheese grits again and a pot of coffee and read lydia davis. i received a forwarded email from my mom about the intervale food hub offering spring shares from february until the end of may. 

this is really exciting, mostly because the intervale was destroyed after hurricane irene this past fall. it’s something like $300 for 13 weeks of just vegetables, which is $23 a week. there is a deluxe share that is $530, which works down to $40 a week. 

the deluxe share comes with bread, maple syrup, frozen blueberries, cheese (fresh goat and hard milk), eggs, and yogurt. the eggs can be delivered biweekly, and the blueberries are biweekly. you can read about the share here. 

i’m talking about this because vermont is a weird agricultural paradise despite its harsh climate, which is getting warmer, but not by that much. the food i eat here is different than it would be if I lived anywhere else. i have been wondering today if i would eat eggs from the farm share, and i don’t really see any reason why i wouldn’t. the benefits outweigh the costs, in terms of supporting a farm directly. and also i stopped buying tofu because the only soy products I want to eat will be in the form of tempeh. not that i ate tofu often, and not that i’ll eat eggs often, and i won’t eat eggs from other places, or in muffins or baked goods—there is no slippery slope here, I guess. health, or something. and then the goat cheese, which is from does’ leap farm and really wonderful. 

(and if you want to yell at me for what i choose to eat, please refrain because that is rude and you never make any progress telling people what they should and should not do. and if you are concerned re: the vegan cookbooks I am making, know that they will still be 100% vegan so do not fear!)

anyway what this boils down to is cost, and this morning I was thinking about value-added products. in the daily rumpus today, stephen elliott said he would be willing to pay $3 for a cup of coffee, which is pretty silly. I bought over a pound of coffee beans from the co-op earlier this week, and it came to $11 and will make far more than 4 cups of coffee. it will make more than 10 cups of coffee, cos I always buy a cup for $1.10. I don’t know where you can get a cup of regular coffee for more than $2, unless its pour over, but with pour-over you’re paying for the time and labor it takes to prepare the cup, so it makes sense. 

bulk coffee beans are cheaper because you have to do the work yourself, but everyone knows that. i used to dislike going to restaurants to eat food i could have prepared myself, mostly because i would get bummed paying $8 for a sandwich when I knew all the involved ingredients came to less than $3, most of the time. but you know, someone makes it and they’re a business and also, you don’t have to do the dishes, but sometimes you do. and sometimes it is really really worth it to pay $12 at pho hong for a noodle dish that quite literally cost $2 to make, because it’s nice not to do the dishes sometimes and also you can’t break it down all the time, but here I am doing just that right now. 

i’m glad my mom told me about the intervale hub csa being back, because its the one I got last fall and I’d like to support them again. the intervale hub is different than a normal farm share because its a collective of different farms that specialize in different things. you get a larger variety of produce and value-added farm products (there is no other CSA i know of that offers bread and maple syrup, but some have flowers) and you support many farmers at once. and also the intervale is a mile and a half from my house. 

I have two hours left and one slice of bread and some peanut butter. this is a long post about nothing in particular. 

EDIT: read more is broken and i tried a few different codes but none of them worked and i am really sorry.

Hi Tumblrs,

On Sunday, I’m participating in a fundraising event called Vinyasa for Vermont.  The local yoga community is coming together at UVM to raise money for The Intervale Farmer Recovery Fund and the Vermont Disaster Relief Fund.  My fundraising efforts are focused specifically on the farmers of the Intervale.

The farmers of the Intervale provide local healthy and organic food to hundreds of families in the greater Burlington area. Farms had devastating losses of over $750,000 in the August 29th flood in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. The Intervale Center has received $250,000 in requests from farmers to help with recovery. The fund has raised approximately $80,000 to date. They need our help to allow the farmers of the Intervale to continue to exist. 

Please consider helping me help the farmers of the Intervale keep growing, to help keep people in contact with the earth and to help the adults and kids of this community to know how food is actually produced.

http://www.razoo.com/story/Aliforvermont

With Gratitude,

Ali