Starting this semester, the new Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, led by sophomore Noemie (Nemo) Keller, will provide fresh fruits and vegetables to Hopkins affiliates at the price of $25 a week. When Keller discovered that the CSA program at Hopkins had been discontinued during last year’s winter break, she decided to work with Real Food Hopkins to bring it back.
CSA is a food distribution system that exists in communities throughout the country. Through CSA, consumers pay to receive fruits and vegetables each week from a local farm. Until last January, a CSA program existed at Hopkins on a small scale. This year, Keller, in cooperation with Real Food Hopkins, reinstated the program, making fresh, local, organic produce a more accessible option on campus.
“At Hopkins, one of the things we want to be at the forefront of is being sustainable. We do provide good food through the meal plan, but what about the juniors and seniors [or] staff and graduate students?” Keller, community service coordinator of Real Food Hopkins, said.
“There are markets nearby, but to get a weekly delivery of food is difficult. We want everyone to have the opportunity and the option to choose organic food. It’s also good to educate people about local, humane and ecologically sound food as opposed to processed food.”
The produce is provided by One Straw Farm, the largest organic farm in Maryland. Every Monday at 3:30 p.m., this produce is delivered to Hopkins. Real Food Hopkins volunteers then arrange a pick-up station in front of Charles St. Market, and subscribers come there from 4 to 5:30 p.m. to collect their portions of fruits and vegetables. The Hopkins CSA received its first delivery on Sept. 8, and the program is set to continue for the next 10 weeks.
“The farm chooses whatever is ready over the weekend and chooses how much one portion of each food is,” Keller said. “[Our] members get eight portions, so they may receive a bag of potatoes, a watermelon, two big heads of broccoli and so forth... We’re still doing fruit like watermelon right now, but that will change to more vegetables and leafy greens once fall starts. That’s the seasonal part of it — you can get really good produce from Maryland as opposed to eating produce from a grocery store that could’ve been grown 1,500 miles away.”
The program is completely student-led, from establishing contact with the farm to the supervision of food pick-up. All of the organizers are currently Real Food Hopkins members, but as a system focused on helping the community, the CSA staff hopes to engage volunteers from all different backgrounds, incentivizing them by offering to provide them with free shares of produce.
“How much food you can take is already chosen by the farms, so what volunteers do is check IDs of subscribers and guide them through the pick-up,” sophomore Sarah Manning, Real Food Hopkins member and CSA volunteer, said.
“It’s pretty efficient, but generally we need at least two volunteers at the station. Hopefully other people will volunteer to come help us, and if friends want to help out, that’s great as well.”
The program gained several new subscribers after advertising both online and at the pick-up location on Sept. 8. The upgraded CSA has already been receiving positive feedback from members that were not only satisfied by the quality and variety of the food but were also surprised about the large amount of food that they received for $25, which is a special discounted price for the Hopkins CSA.
“I was really happy with the vegetable[s] I received last week. We received tomatillos, and I never have cooked with these before. I ended up making gazpacho with the tomatillos, peppers, tomatoes and onions from the CSA — it was delicious,” senior Lindsey Sanborn wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
“My roommate and I shared the produce, and it turned out to be the perfect amount for two people. I’m not sure if maybe we eat more veggies than the normal person because we’re both vegetarians, or if we cook more, but we definitely had the right amount for a week.”
Through a special deal with One Straw Farm, Real Food Hopkins will be receiving one free portion of food for every 10 portions bought by subscribers. Real Food Hopkins is planning to donate this extra share of food, along with any other leftovers, to Cooking 4 Love, a community service group that cooks for a woman’s shelter, as well as to other community service groups that need food.
“What we’re trying to do is donate whatever extras we have, and we have different charities we want to give them to. Those who buy a share can donate as well, if it’s more food than they need,” Manning said.
“It’s a good community-building program because you can choose to donate to those in need as well as support a local farm by purchasing their produce.”
The CSA’s deliveries will be ending on Nov. 17, the week before Thanksgiving. They will not be available during the spring semester, as the farm can only produce food from the summer to late autumn. As a result, Keller hopes that the program will eventually become self-sufficient, so that those living on campus during summer break will be able to continue CSA when the farm begins producing food again. As far as this semester is concerned, students can still subscribe to CSA until the end of September.
“We hope to build a network of people who really like CSA [and who] will also want fresh food during summer so that when the farm starts producing in June there will [be] people to run the program during the 10 weeks of summer. As long as there are 10 people who want it, people can take turns monitoring the pick-up,” Keller said. “The long-term goal is that people in CSA themselves will make their own schedule and run their own program. It’s our campus, and we want fresh food, so we need to work together so that we can get it.”
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