Funny food is normal food

These two carrots are best-buds.

I just love the treasures we find in our bi-weekly CSA share. (During the summer, we collect a share every week.) The farm where we get our CSA is both organic and bio-dynamic. This means we get real-looking food, as opposed to perfect, uniform produce. As an adult, used to regular grocery-store food, it has taken me awhile to appreciate the beauty and 'realness' of food that is not factory-farmed. Our children, however, raised on just such food seem to think the more interesting our food looks, the better! When the kids come along to pick up our weekly share, they delight in searching out the carrots with 4 ends or the squash that is bent back around on itself.

The above picture is one very cool finding from this week. We weren't there to pick up the share this week, so my mom chose out these two carrots, who are obviously very closely connected, knowing our children delight in just this type of thing. I decided to have them finish out their life in the same soup. Oddly enough, the one carrot was just hugging the other one. They came apart fairly easily.

I encourage you, particularly this summer when the fresh, local foods start to be more prolific, to find the joy in 'oddball' fruits and veggies that have been selected and grown for their nutritional value and their taste, as opposed to their ability to travel well and be uniform. It is funny that we have come to associate these latter qualities with 'goodness', while the actual value disappears from our food.

Well, I'm off to eat some split pea soup with fresh bread!