Welcome

As a proud member of the Ploughshare Farms CSA, I've gotten the hang of eating seasonally to some degree -- beet time still feels like a challenge, for example, and I always run out of preserved summer vegetables long before the last snow shoveling round. But lately, as I've been boosting the number of  backyard barbecues, I've been wondering about a different type of seasonal eating. I began wondering: does meat have a season, too? Here's what I discovered in talking to farmers and a co-op manager: the answer is yes, but also no.

It’s the locavore’s dilemma: there’s a staggering amount of information out there these days on how to “eat local,” but the resources themselves aren’t necessarily fine-tuned to one’s particular locale. I may share similar principles with a local food lover in San Francisco, but we certainly do not share the same growing season or farmers markets. So if I prefer a tomato from my own backyard over one shipped halfway across the country, shouldn’t I also prefer a cookbook with local roots?