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ingredients into receptive channels.
    As with the core structure of the Local Food Hub, which carries food from farmers “fresh, frozen, and preserved” through every month of the year, seasonal agriculture gives a backbone to Feast! The produce selection changes with the seasons, as do many of the samples and the café offerings. Collier describes the seasonality of Feast!’s offerings with poetic delight. “In winter, when kale and turnips and greens are plentiful, there’s kale every day in soups, roasted turnips,” she notes. “In the summertime, the menu drips with tomatoes and basil. Seasonality is what keeps Feast! really fresh.” The café offers a seasonal special grilled cheese and a seasonal special salad, which allows Feast! to consistently buy from local farmers.
    Whether through the Local Food Hub, Feast! or personal experience, Collier is a wealth of knowledge about local farmers and agriculture. Having formerly employed Joel Slezak of Free Union Grass Farm and responsible for the success of Cville Candy Company, Collier has an apparent eye for nurturing culinary talent. The trend of young farmers and homesteaders has not gone unnoticed, nor has the increased specialization of certain farms. Such specialization works for businesses like Feast!, which now have the opportunity to order from farmers with heritage products almost tailor-made for menus and fine dining.
    O UTSIDE THE B IG B OX : CSA S AND O NLINE R ETAILERS
    The success of the gourmet grocer in Charlottesville reflects one side of its unique culinary tastes: the taste for the fancy, the unique, the highbrow. Yet the down-home, get-your-hands-dirty and meet-your-farmer appeal of community-supported agriculture connects with an overlapping yet distinct interest of the area. Community-supported agriculture programs, or CSAs, abound in the area, subscribed to by a variety of customers. College students, young mothers and die-hard hippies can all go to the farm or to a pickup site to grab their “subscription”: a basket of the freshest fruits and vegetables the farm can produce. A CSA’s most basic purpose is to link the producer and consumer directly, allowing for a greater understanding of food origins and a deeper appreciation of local food sourcing.
    CSA subscriptions can vary in subscription length, size and frequency of pickups. One of the constants of CSA-style grocery buying is the consistency of beautiful, just-picked vegetables, fruit, flowers and herbs. The relationship between farmer and consumer in this case is a symbiotic one: the CSA subscriber gets direct access to the freshest local produce, and farmers get funding upfront at the beginning of growing season. If bad weather, machinery problems or unforeseen issues disrupt the growing season or the farm’s ability to produce, both farmer and subscriber shoulder the burden of costs. This alternative to more conventional, industrialized methods of food distribution gives the customer a more active role in food production and allows the farmer to keep his or her products locally purchased.
    But what happens if a consumer wants to try different offerings from different farms? What if a long drive to the farm isn’t part of one’s getting-off-work schedule? Though the economic and agricultural model of community-supported agriculture is a thriving business in Charlottesville, others have figured out a way to promote the CSA culture with less time and more options. Brett Wilson of Horse & Buggy Produce has figured out a way to offer grocery subscriptions with a flexibility that fits a variety of lifestyles. Horse & Buggy allows customers to purchase weekly or biweekly shares of products such as produce, dairy, bread, dry goods and various meats. Shares are available for pickup or home delivery, a boon for those too busy to schedule time for meet-up sites.
    With a well-tailored website and an easy personality, Brett Wilson has a Yale