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I just finished reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. It was a good, quick read. One of the quotes I liked from the book is found in the “Eat Food: Food Defined” section.

When you eat from the farmers’ market, you automatically eat food that is in season, which is usually when it is most nutritious. Eating in season also tends to diversify your diet - because you can’t buy strawberries or broccoli or potatoes twelve months of the year, you’ll find yourself experimenting with other foods when they come into the market. The CSA box does an even better job of forcing you out of your dietary rut because you’ll find things in your weekly allotment that you would never buy on your own. Whether it’s a rutabaga or an unfamiliar winter squash, the CSA box’s contents invariably send you to your cookbooks to figure out what in the world to do with them. Cooking is one of the most important health consequences of buying food from local farmers; for one thing, when you cook at home you seldom find yourself reaching for the ethoxylated diglycerides or high-fructose corn syrup.

We are almost at our 1 year anniversary of joining our CSA and it has made a a huge difference in how we eat and how we approach food in the grocery store. I actually look at produce based on what is in season and where it is grown now instead of buying on impulse based on what I feel like eating. A few weeks ago, we received pea shoots in our box. I had no idea what to do with them. I looked online and found a really easy recipe and now I look each week with anticipation in my box to see if more pea shoots are included. Tasty!