Hunting for CSAs (community-supported agriculture)

Yes I know that most of the meat I buy in the grocery store comes from animals that lived miserable lives. I've heard the stories of egg-laying chickens crammed into cages, barely able to take even a few steps their entire lives. Ditto for the tales of pigs in overcrowded pens biting each other's tails off. The environmental devastation from pig shit was new to me. (Gee, thanks _53 for posting a link to that. You nearly ruined my boyfriend's appetite for the bacon-wrapped pork chops I was serving up!)

There's no way I'm going vegetarian. Humans are omnivores and I accept that we kill to get our meat. Besides, I could never give up bacon. So I went to farmer's markets, thinking that I'd get my meat from small farms where the cows grazed in open fields, the chickens scratched about in the dirt, and the pigs wallowed in mud. But that meat cost 2 to 5 times as much as the cheap meat on sale at the grocery store. The whole chicken I could get for as little as 79 cents/pound? Try $5/lb! Reeling from sticker shock, I shrugged and said, "Those reports are from nutso PETA extremists anyhow. They're exaggerating." And how seriously am I supposed to take a group that says keeping pets is another form of animal exploitation? Spittle-spewing zealots. But I also told myself that when I wasn't so strapped for cash, I would revisit the issue.

( Click to revisit the issue with me... )

my overall grocery bill might be cheaper when I commit to buying the expensive stuff. That would be really weird.

Edited to add: Follow-up post with list of Boston-area CSAs