CSA Supper Club: On the Farms that Feed Us

Join us for CSA Supper Club at the Greenhouse where we’ll upack this week’s CSA box and take time to harvest from the garden, to return around the table as we wash and prepare our greens, as we take time to process our feelings and how we’re coping with recent food safety alarms.

Together, we’ll learn more about the impact larger industrial farming has on the climate, our local ecologies, and our health. We’ll look together at how we got here in this current food system dominated by industrial agriculture, and look to the greens before us grown on a small-scale regenerative farm to help us imagine alternatives for our farming futures.

Sharron, our chef for the evening, will share how food is medicine, and specifically, how fresh food from CSA is medicine for our times of harmful extraction and abuse to the environment. Together, we’ll name how we are coping with some of the gaps in safety and regulation of foods, polluted waterways, food insecurity and other troubles we’re finding ourselves impacted by our food system. We’ll end the evening nourishing ourselves with farm and garden greens, and daring ourselves to dream,rembering the work that came before us, finding ways to imagine how to reach for other ways of feeding ourselves and each other.

Your Facilitator: Sharron Cannon

Sharron Cannon is a PhD candidate in Naturopathic Health Sciences, dedicated to advancing the clinical study of the Endocannabinoid system. With a background as a film and television executive, she now thrives as an facilitator at the Greenhouse & Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park. Her passion lies in outreach and promoting holistic healthcare, emphasizing the transformative power of using food as medicine. You can find her supporting the work of Black Farmer’s United, and working as a caregiver with people with HIV and AIDS to bring the transformative power of food as medicine.

Cooking, sharing, and storytelling through the harvest of the season.

History, place, and imagination are all deeply rooted in what and how we grow and eat.

Each Friday evening, this supper club gathers around ingredients of the week–produce grown in the garden and food from our local CSA. A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is rooted in the idea that community members share in the risks and rewards of farming. By committing to a season’s harvest, we support farmers through the lands’ and our current food system’s uncertainties and in return, receive food that is grown in integrity and largely outside of the current extractive and exploitive, harmful food systems.

Together, we’ll gather to deepen our relationships with the sources of our food and our empathy for the people’s whose hands that food has passed through.

Through collaborative cooking, recipe-sharing, and conversations around the table, we explore the cultural, ecological, and personal dimensions of food. Drawing inspiration from our kitchen’s stories, cookbooks, and the week’s harvest, we’ll discover how the simple act of preparing and sharing a meal can connect us more deeply to land-workers, food-workers, and to the land theirself.

This is a free drop-in program. Come to every class or come to one or two that you are available for.

Workshops are rain or shine.

Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.

When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.

Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.