Tasting Intown

By Megan Volpert

I can barely keep count of all the positive changes that signing up for a Fresh Harvest subscription has brought to my life.

The good people of FH deliver a giant box of extremely local and entirely organic produce to my front door every two weeks. It’s just my wife and I at home, so we get their smallest basket: $26.78, including taxes and delivery. There are no hidden fees and no items I’m forced to eat if I don’t like them. I get an email reminding me to customize my basket and another letting me know when I’ve been billed.

Beyond what’s in my basket, I can add all kinds of other local products. Yes, Holeman + Finch baked goods can now be had in your own home. Yes, you can add that juice cleanse package from Press Together Juices you’ve been wanting to try.

You can try a pound of ground beef or a threepound rump roast or experiment with bone marrow. Get your milk and eggs. Do you like granola? Do you know what raspberry kombucha tastes like?

Are you running low on chia seeds, or coffee beans, or ground turmeric, or brown rice?

Like women everywhere, I do not have time to work all day and then hit up two different grocery stores for all my ingredients, prep an amazingly fresh dinner with those, then sit down to try to enjoy it before doing the dishes before going to bed to get up in the morning and do it all over again.

The more time I can save – by delivery, by automation, by reminders – without going over budget, the happier I am and the more time I have to actually enjoy my food and my family. By my count, the $55 I spend on Fresh Harvest every month saves me about $10 in gasoline and six hours of shopping time.

The baskets come with cute notes, happy thoughts, recipes, pictures, profiles on local farmers, information on charitable endeavors, and so on. The FH people themselves are always looking for ways to improve community and health through food. I’ll skip the rant on food deserts, because we all know Atlanta has several. I mean, how close do you personally live to the nearest Trader Joe’s, let alone the nearest farmer’s market? If you can see it out your front window, good for you, but most of us can’t. FH is reasonably priced enough to help bridge some of those neighborhood grocery gaps.

The baskets themselves have all been so terrific, each in different ways. There’s the one that caused me to call my mother and ask what I should do with shallots. There’s the one that caused my wife to jump up and down, squealing that parsnips are her favorite thing ever. There’s the one that finally got me to learn how to peel a mango. There’s the one where I bartered a bunch of fennel with a neighbor for two lemons from her own delivery.

And often there are presents! Freebies I’ve gotten so far: juice, granola, coffee, red cabbage, lemon. I’ve been preaching Fresh Harvest to basically every caring-but-busy person I know. I know about a lot of things, but I have no real idea what good produce looks like in the dead of winter or when fruits are precisely at peak of their season. Fresh Harvest is so awesome because these people – who are just over in Clarkston –save me time and money, educate me and improve my health through access to better quality food, and encourage me to support local farmers and to be more neighborly. Fresh Harvest delivers to Intown, so give it a try at freshharvest.deliverybizpro.com.

Megan Volpert lives in Decatur, teaches in Roswell and writes books about popular culture.