Love your CSK

Serious Green: Community Supported Kitchens

TRESSA EATON

"A CSK DOESN'T JUST DELIVER LOCAL, SUSTAINABLE PRODUCT, IT PROVIDES YOU WITH A READY-TO-EAT MEAL."

You try your best to be green, buying local when you can, recycling, conserving water, the list goes on. But when it comes to participating in a Community Supported Agriculture (or CSA) share, you stop short. Unknown quantities of a random assortment of vegetables piling up on you week after week? Eeek.

If this sounds like you, or maybe you don't like too cook or find it too time-consuming or too isolating, Community Supported Kitchens to the rescue!

A Community Supported Kitchen (CSK) is a new idea to connect farmers and eaters, especially those eaters who wand to eat locally, but currently don't. CSKs are a totally new model: they're not a catering company and not quite a private home chef. These cooperative kitchens take away the mystery of what to do with those vegetables and all the cooking that comes along with them. They buy fruit, vegetables, meat, and eggs from local farms and transform them into meals for sale to that same community, all the while using super-high standards for environmental stewardship.

A CSK moves beyond the original idea of buying into a share of a farmer's harvest or even the second-wave idea of buying into a share of bacon, preserves, pie, or fish.

Instead of buying into the vegetables from a CSA, you're buying into the prepared food made from those same vegetables. A CSK doesn't just deliver local, sustainable product, it provides you with a ready-to-eat meal.

preparing and sharing food is an important human activity

The CSKs below all emphasize a sustainable model for producing prepared food and meals on a community scale, not on a corporate or home scale. The people behind the kitchens encourage members to get involved and stress that preparing and sharing food is an important human activity, an essential part of any community.

And yes, it's expensive. And no, this is not the answer to getting fresh, local, sustainable food to all people, regardless of income or socio-economic level. But, it is a new way to get more people eating good food and for communities to feed themselves.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/09/serious-green-community-supported-kitchens-csks.html