Harvie Green member farm visits so far: 86 / 2271 = 3.8%!
It is our goal to get every Harvie Green member to visit a farm or a producer within a year.
Come out to the Harvie x Yarnick’s Farm Fall Festival on Sat, Sep 30th: get a free pumpkin, take a hay ride, see the greenhouses, and shop the farm store in Indiana, PA. Register on EventBrite by using the QR code above!
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“Getting back into the routine” by Mackenzie Nelsen
Perhaps I am conditioned from a lifetime of our public school system, but for me, Labor Day and the first signs of fall are a time to step back and reset my routines.
I have a love/hate relationship with the routine of grocery shopping. I secretly hate having a Monday morning deadline for my Harvie box. My default, like many, is to scramble at the last minute for each meal. I am hungry right then – so I stop whatever I am doing and purchase food. I run into Giant Eagle and I grab the first thing I can think of for dinner, I pick up my phone and order a $40 meal from UberEats, or I run out on a lunch break and grab a sandwich from a cafe. This style of eating is so easy in the moment – I am hungry… so I eat. The problem with this is that money, time, health, and my values go out the door when I eat like this. These smaller decisions don’t feel as bad because I had to make them. I’ve broken them up into small, less significant amounts of time or money. But a 20 minute trip to the store everyday is over 2 hours of grocery shopping – and a one-time $19 lunch break sandwich can add up to ~ $100 / week.
On the contrary, in my ideal week, I sit down on Sunday and I plan out my menu. I do this solely and begrudgingly because the deadline to edit my Harvie box is Monday morning at 9 am. For some reason, it feels so hard to take 30 minutes to intentionally plan out a week’s menu – but when I do, the difference is immeasurable. I finish work and I don’t have to think about what’s for dinner- I can go to the park instead of going to the store, I save money because I’m buying a chicken salad sandwich ahead of time instead of paying for the convenience of a cafe. I’m eating food that I’ve taken purposeful time to choose – food that is more seasonal, food that is handmade by people that I know, and food grown with the sustainable and ethical practices that I strive to eat and live by.
As I reset my habits and routines this fall, I can’t help but think about what ‘eating with purpose’ means to me. For me, eating with purpose is embracing that 30 minutes on Sunday that it takes to plan my menu, embracing the regularity of getting my groceries every Tuesday, buying the Harvie Kitchen chicken salad instead of wandering into a café at lunch while I’m hungry, and slowing down enough to eat with purpose.
How do you eat with purpose? We’d love to publish your thoughts in a future member letter!
Some member recommendations! Got one? Send it to simon@harvie.farm, for each one we publish we’ll send you a mystery box on us!
Member recommendations segment #4 – Jacobsen Pure Flake Finishing Salt: “This salt will change your cooking! Put this salt on the table for dinner and your guest will rave about it or use it on an end-of-season tomato sandwich. You’ll find 100 uses for it. I asked Katie to get in a few bags of this salt because I was out, so get it while it lasts!” -Simon, Harvie member and founder.
