By Pat Dillon
Madison Magazine
Special To Channel 3000

Organic food has always garnered a mixed reputation. There are those who swear by it for environmental and health reasons, others who label it a costly liberal ideal, while some have simply never heard of it. Yet in nurturing black earth, at farmers' market stalls, and on grocery store shelves in southern Wisconsin, organic produce is sprouting up this time of year. In fact, organic eating's popularity is coming full circle as today's growers, sellers, and buyers are more mindful of the balance between money and the mainstream.

My father was a first-generation health food freak. Dad made his own granola and filled our cupboards with barely used natural products like lecithin and Tiger Milk -- for what I was never sure.

My sisters and I lived in mortal fear that my mother would replace our "wholesome, building-bodies-twelve-ways" Wonder Bread with the stuff seemingly made of whole wheat and wood chunks, the fiber-filled alternative to our wonderful mushy white bread. We ate fat-free milk over whole bran flakes while our friends were dished up Captain Crunch with whole-milk chasers. Saturday mornings were sweeter at their houses, but to Dad's credit, they were more regular at ours.

Dad favored juice over soda (not without a mutiny) and ultimately replaced his coffee with tea. But the real assault on my teenage processed-food sensibility was the day he declared us all vegetarians and took the meat out of the spaghetti sauce. I rebelled with years of fatty, high-sodium, deep-fried food consumption -- affordable college food. Ultimately I matured and returned to my historic and culinary roots.

Over the winter months I stored several varieties of radishes, two celeriac roots, a kohlrabi the size of a pumpkin, carrots, kale, sweet potatoes, new potatoes, russets and goldens -- more than I can eat in a season. Some I picked, some I bagged, all part of my worker share from the 29-acre Vermont Valley Farm, a Dane County member of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

Like other CSA farmers, Vermont Valley provides a direct relationship between the consumers and the people who grow their food -- organically grown produce, plant, dairy and meat products.

But the best part? I'm doing my father proud and our community a favor, for every time I pick up my CSA share box loaded with the week's harvest, I do it knowing that my veggies were grown without herbicides or pesticides. I can offer my family a healthy dose of organic produce, while playing a minor role in sustainability. I'm a new recruit to CSA work, but one of many who are helping to advance the concept of organic food production from a niche market into the mainstream.

What's Out There?

In Dane County, the organic food mantra seems to be 'think globally but purchase locally.' In other words, forgo California corporate if you can. Instead, support your local food growers, the Dane County CSA, farmers' markets, and independent grocers and distributors like Regent Street Co-op and Jenifer Street Market in Madison, and Main Street Market in Stoughton. Buying locally can be more expensive than buying bulk from the big boxes, but the extra expense helps support our local economy through sustainability. The idea is to support what's here so it doesn't disappear.

"Life in general is about priorities," says Dave Perkins, who started Vermont Valley Farm with his wife Barb eleven years ago. The CSA farm has nearly nine hundred members, most of whom purchase their share of vegetables while others barter for them by laboring on the farm. "What did you pay for the last soda you bought or the last candy bar or the last time you went out to eat, or for your car? Food is just one of those priorities. In chemical agriculture when you're spraying herbicides you can do it cheaper if you just include the cost of production, but if you include the cost of the impact that system has on the environment and health and ground and surface water, that's way more expensive, but those aren't numbers that are easy to put your hands on." Dave Perkins knows firsthand. With a degree in agronomy, he once sold atrazine to farmers, a chemical he says has tainted fifty percent of Dane County's rural wells.

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