Community Supported Agriculture
We face a paradox in that a move to a post-oil food system will be essential soon, but there's relatively little appetite for them now. For now, we can only work with those enlightened consumers/citizens who already understand the importance of a post-oil diet.
During this time of transition, it can be very difficult to create pieces of the food system we need in the future, if doing so depends on selling food through the normal commercial channels. A vegetable or salad grower might seek to supply local people with local, organic vegetables through a local shop, but at certain times of the year rival, imported produce might be much cheaper. In those weeks the grower will have no income, which might mean that his business becomes non-viable. A baker selling preservative-free, organic bread through a supermarket might find that on some days his bread sells out, but on other days the bread stays on the shelves and goes stale. A hospital caterer might offer a local, organic option in the hospital restaurant, and on some days it might sell well but on other days it might not.
Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a generic term for a range of different schemes which connect the consumer and producer together in a more intimate and long-term way. At its simplest this might mean an organic box scheme, where the grower decides what goes in the weekly box depending on what is most plentiful that week. In the purest sense it might mean that a group of consumers take a share in the output of a farm. They may even rent the farm and pay a salary to a farm manager. In either case, the consumers are sharing the risk of a crop failure, as well as the rewards of a bumper crop.
One thing that most CSAs have in common is that the consumers are happy to take what is available, rather than deciding on a whim what they would like, as is the case with the supermarket shopper. Obviously this helps to minimise waste, and to make the food more affordable to the consumer.
Even more important is that the supporters of a CSA take an interest in the ecological farming techniques used by the grower. At the very least they understand that the grower is certified as using Organic methods. This appreciation by the customer means that the grower can afford to spend time on these techniques, whereas in "the market" customers may tend to select items based on the financial price more than ecological benefit.
Similarly if we want to develop more urban and peri-urban fruit and vegetable production, it is important that growers who wish to begin that production have a reliable and loyal market for their produce. If we could guarantee a prospective grower that we (as a group of consumers) will buy almost all of her production, she might be inclined to start growing. If we tell her than we might buy some of her produce, or we might not, depending on what prices in the market are like from one week to the next, she might not.
Fruit and vegetable production is the most obvious area for a CSA, but we are interested in developing CSA models for other foods, including pig clubs or community-supported bakeries.