With the ground frozen and the harsh arctic winds keeping you holed up inside, now's the perfect time to shop for fresh, locally grown produce.

Say what?

Yes, some folks are doing the shopping now and the eating later in community-supported agriculture groups, or CSAs. Subscribers pay in advance for shares of a farm's crop over a whole growing season, and get boxes of fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables every week from late spring to late autumn. It's not too early to start thinking about it, because now's when CSAs make up membership lists.

A year ago, I took the plunge and joined one, Farmdale Organics, and I can definitely say there are solid reasons to do so, as well as some not to do it.

First, the history: Although the basic idea is as old as the hills, the modern CSA movement started concurrently in Europe and Japan in the mid-1960s, taking root in the United States by the early '80s. There are a little over a dozen farms serving Philadelphia-area residents through CSAs, almost all on a one-to-one basis. A group called Farm to City, headed by Bob Pierson, manages a group of four CSAs along with several weekly farmers markets in Philly. True to its name, Farm to City not only matches urbanites with farmers but physically brings the food into town to a handful of dropoff/pickup points.

Pierson is the region's main CSA guy who works with the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and the Rodale Institute to help small family farmers practice "sustainable regenerative agriculture. " For a farmer, Pierson explained, "the advantage is that he gets a good part of the money up front so he doesn't have to go down to the bank and take out a loan. And he's not putting the seeds in the ground and wondering who's going to buy them - he knows who and where and how many seeds to put in the ground. "

Great, but what are the advantages? Well, the most obvious is freshness: Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy reports that average supermarket produce is 7 to 14 days old. With Farm to City's CSAs, food is harvested in the morning, packed by noon, driven into town and picked up by shareholders late that afternoon. There's no arguing with fresh produce.

But Pierson noted that "most people want not only fresher food, they want healthful food, so they're very interested that it be organic - or at least transitional. "

Farms are called "transitional" when they have adopted organic practices but have not yet been certified - usually a three-year process. Today, many area farms are making the transition, and three of Farm to City's four CSAs are organic; it's the fourth, Pierson said, that's hurting for subscribers.

Another benefit is the constant stream of fruits and vegetables. Some will be produce you already know and love - carrots, potatoes, onions, strawberries - and others will be items you wouldn't have selected for yourself. Kohlrabi, maybe, or parsnips or white beets.

Sue Minis, a CSA member in Powelton Village, said, "The best thing about this is that I've tried new vegetables that I'd never had before. I discovered that I liked kohlrabi and a couple of other things that I never found out what they were. "

To help familiarize members with plants, Pierson sends out an e-mail newsletter with recipes and serving suggestions.

The weekly surprise is a double-edged coin, though: What if you open the box and it's all stuff you already know and hate?

It could happen: When I asked Sue Minis for a downside, she immediately answered, "Opening the box and finding eggplant. I can't stand it. " And I, for one, second that emotion!

Joseph Griffin, who helped get Farm to City off the ground and now runs Covered Bridge Produce, admitted this sort of transaction is "like going into a clothing store and the salesperson says, 'You're getting a sweater today. ' "

While each week's box does hold a variety of produce, your favorite food might not be in season or may not be something that grows in our area.

However, all deals are not final: There are "trade boxes" at dropoff points so that members can swap for something they like. And many CSAs have end-of-year questionnaires to further determine likes and dislikes.

It's also possible you could open the box and find less than expected, if there's a weak harvest. So far for Farm to City, this is mainly a theoretical problem, but as a shareholder, you're at the mercy of Mother Nature just as the farmer is.

Even in the right conditions, it's debatable whether you save money by buying most of your produce in a lump sum at the beginning of the season. Certainly you can get conventional produce at your grocery story for less per pound, but if you buy organic, the CSA produce probably costs a little less. Last year on an average week, for about $20, I'd take home on average 15-20 pieces of produce.

The economic question is one Pierson gets a lot, and it's not easy to answer quickly. "Once," he said, "this woman would not accept that I couldn't tell her just how much it would come out to. I kept trying to go through all the variables, but she kept pressing me for exact numbers. Finally I had to say, 'You probably ought to go to the supermarket and get your food there, 'cause this is really about something else. ' "

And it is - that was evident in August when all of Farmdale Organic's members were invited to the farm for a picnic and tour.

Sitting down to lunch at big picnic tables with the farmer's family, watching city kids play with farm kids, was great. But the kicker was the trip to the fields to see where everything was grown. Along with other members, I asked questions and got answers about how the bugs are kept down without pesticides, which rows of what would wind up in our boxes next, and so forth. Here was something very basic to the process of choosing and buying food, I thought, yet nowhere else did we get the chance.

With food security now an issue, I asked Bob if he expected to see people turning to CSAs for that kind of assurance, that direct connection to the source of their food. "Maybe" was as far as he'd go. "But I was at a conference this fall and a speaker said: 'In an era when we're worrying about security, food security should be uppermost on our minds. We should be thinking about the distance our food has traveled. ' "

People who are joining CSAs are generally thinking about that along with the thoughts of eating well. And while that value is hard to match up against an itemized food budget, it does seem to even out. As Sue Minis concluded, "Even if it does wind up being more expensive, the idea that I'm supporting a particular farmer in Lancaster County instead of just agribusiness, that makes it worth it to us." *