Bridget McMahon - former vegetarian and current foodie - took red chard home for the first time last week. The very same day, Kelly Barner - homeless and so new to veggies that she calls asparagus a "prickly thing" - got her first look at the chard, too.
The dark leafy greens with strawberry-red stems came to both women by way of a fast-growing program known as Community Supported Agriculture. CSAs, which number more than 12,500 nationwide, allow consumers to buy produce directly from local farms, and it's the farmer and the season that dictate which fruits and vegetables - and how much of them - are delivered each week.
Dinosaur kale, canary peppers and kohlrabi will make their way into area kitchens and stomachs from CSA farms, which grow lots of unfamiliar produce. Because a portion is donated to soup kitchens, some needy Baltimoreans are getting to know the unusual foods at the same time as gourmets. In city shelters and suburban kitchens, cooks are turning to the Internet, cookbooks and even strangers to identify these foods and figure out how to prepare them.
"Swiss chard, kale can be intimidating," said Joan Norman, whose family owns One Straw Farm in White Hall, which provided the red chard to both McMahon and Barner. "People are used to eating any vegetable they want, any day they want it, whatever the vegetable. If you're being forced into eating what's in season, it's not always comfortable."
Even for familiar foods, the volume of produce that arrives each week can be daunting, as it piles up on kitchen counters or jams refrigerator shelves.
But none of it goes to waste at the Mattie B. Uzzle Outreach Center, where Barner lives. The homeless shelter incorporates the produce not just into dinner, but also into nutrition classes.
Women learning the basics of label-reading and the food pyramid are also finding out how to prepare veggies that could stump accomplished home cooks.
"Some of them had never heard of eggplant or squash," said Jewel Gray, executive director of Collington Square Nonprofit Corp., which runs the East Baltimore shelter for about 55 women and children.
Produce provided by One Straw get much more exotic than that. Baby bok choy and garlic scapes may be freshly plucked from a local field, but they seem infinitely more foreign than Chilean grapes. And not just at the shelter, which is receiving food from the program for a second year.
