This post has been written over the past six months...

The Gift of Organic Food

After much asking around (Thanks to Sue, Sara and Amit who all offered their opinions), if this gift idea was WAY to far out to be considered a REAL gift, I decided that yes, indeed giving Joanna a weekly subscription to a Share Organics local organic food bin was going to be a part of her birthday (Dec 28th) present. And today (this was way back in January) the first bin of goods arrived.

We started out with a weekly delivery, which while it seemed completely reasonably at first (at $35/week it was a bit expensive for veggies, but I figured that if it meant that we could eat more organic veggies it would be worth it.  But truth be told, we just couldn't keep up.  Too many veggies.  On top of too many veggies. This was likely because we went with the local only box, meaning that the produce had to be from geographically close locations. The types of veggies that we're used to weren't regulars in our boxes. So we quickly figured out that one every two weeks was more reasonable for us.

Flash forward six months.

We kept up getting our bins into April. We had sunchokes galore, leeks a plenty, bags of blueberries, an interesting number of sprouted bean/seed mixes and some delicious greens. Then we decided that we were ready to move on. There's a few reasons:

  1. Growing season was starting and I was keen to plant a garden and enjoy both the activity of a garden and the fruit of my labour
  2. $35 for a box like the one above seemed a bit pricey, (I know, I know you don't do this sort of thing for economy) but even though it was delivered and even through the food was very good (and interesting) it still seemed a bit pricey
  3. We're still regularly going to the grocery store so the delivery aspect of the service isn't really making life easier. Buying organic veggies while you're at the grocery store isn't any harder than regular veggies. :)

Would I recommend getting organic deliveries?

As an experiment? Definitely. Share Organics themselves were very easy to get started with, they were on time and the food generally arrived in good shape. The experience really helped me begin to get over the idea that bottom dollar pricing is the most important aspect of food. Buying organic seems like a good idea to me, and this experience helped me get in the psychological mindset to want to continue to buy organic, by making it dead easy to have organic food around.

Previously the organic food aisle was generally just more expensive, but having gone through this experience, it seems that the additional monthly expense is really quite small. I don't think I'll be restarting our subscription with Share Organics (or any other providers) when my garden gets tired. Simple plan going forward, remain a frequent visitor to the organic aisle.