Fresh Vegetables!
(posted by Dave)



So last Wednesday, we got a chance to stay overnight at one of the first organic farms in China! The Gao family runs a small chemical and pesticide free vegetable farm near Anlong village, which is about an hour or so west of here. They offer a CSA (which stands community-sponsored agriculture, in case you don't know), and deliver their veggies to 150 or so subscribers in the city of Chengdu.

Of course we signed up, which means that we'll have fresh organic produce delivered to our door (okay, the university gate around the corner) every Tuesday and Friday afternoon! They were apologetic that our vegetables, picked in the early morning, will have to stay on the truck until 4:00 or so, and asked us if we were okay with that. Coming from a country where some people consider a one month old tomato shipped a couple thousand miles “fresh”, we enthusiastically agreed.

This is one of those cases where a picture is worth a thousand words, and since we posted eighty-some pictures of the farm on to Flickr, (with expert comments by Jane, I might add), I highly recommend that you click on the link below for more info. Jane is also writing an essay on our stay there for possible inclusion in Chengdoo, the local English language news magazine, so stay tuned for further posts about our time there.

Our set on Flickr:
http://ping.fm/q6NPE

Annnd, if you want even more info, our friend Matt (who told us about the farm in the first place), gave us these links to a couple of stories in the American media - one from NPR, and the other from the Christian Science Monitor.

http://ping.fm/C1RYG

http://ping.fm/3lymO