Last week, when One Straw made its first deliveries of the season, women and children at Mattie B., as the shelter is known, also received strawberries, lettuce, kale and that mysterious red chard.
Not far away, doctors, nurses and other professionals at Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health picked up the same mix from One Straw. Some of them weren't sure what to do with the red chard either.
"It hasn't been in my house," said McMahon, a nurse at the school. The same was true for the kale she received.
McMahon and other Hopkins employees paid for their produce, buying what is known as a CSA "share" or "subscription." For $540, they will receive eight types of vegetables or fruit per week, from June to November.
CSA farms date to before 1990, when they numbered about 60 nationwide, according to a Rodale Institute report. Today, the number of CSA farms is up more than 200-fold and continues to grow, U.S. Department of Agriculture figures indicate.
One Straw alone has 1,500 CSA subscribers. For the past three years, Hopkins has been a stop on the farm's delivery route. Participation has grown from 25 in 2007 to 70 this year, says Brent Kim, a senior researcher at Hopkins' Center for a Livable Future who oversees the CSA program.
For every 10 shares, One Straw donates one to a community food organization. The Center for a Livable Future donates a couple more. That food goes to Mattie B. and a few other charities.
Eating locally grown food can lead to improved nutrition and a healthier planet by diversifying diets and cutting the distance that food travels, according to CSA advocates. But it's not easy eating green - not when the farmer gets to decide what's for dinner.
The typical CSA haul is a big box of roughage, lots of greens, lots of foods that are good for the body but rarely make it into the grocery cart. CSA farmers serve up what's in season and what grows well in the area. The globalized food-supply chain may have trained shoppers to grab the same things in the produce aisle week after week, month after month, but it can't coax tomatoes out of a Maryland field in June.
To help budding locavores along, One Straw posts recipes on its Web site. On a page called "Name That Vegetable," photos of individual veggies help customers know what's what.
"They get home, and they don't know what it is," Norman said. "So in the privacy of your own home you can secretly admit you do not know what arugula looks like in a bunch."
