Last week, Hazon food program staff member Avigail and I accompanied members of three Hazon CSAs to visit a religious community with some strangely familiar traditions.

The family whose house we were at dressed more or less the way their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. They spoke English to us, but they often used a dialect of German among themselves. The modestly dressed young wife and her sweet-faced, bearded young husband tended a brood of six children, and their house was noticeably free of many modern appliances.

Hasidic Jews in Borough Park? Nope! We were in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and our hosts were Amish farmers.

The trip to White Swan Farm in New Holland, PA was intended to give CSA members from Lancaster and Philadelphia a firsthand glimpse of where their produce was coming from. Intrigued by the promise of freshly-picked fruit and homemade dairy, members of all ages made the drive out to New Holland, where they were rewarded with the chance to pick their own black raspberries and eat locally produced ice cream and sorbet. A few lucky visitors, like Robin Rifkin, site coordinator from Kol Ami in Philadelphia, even got to help make butter.

But the trip was not just about fresh, delicious food. Being on the farm provided the members with an opportunity for reflection about what being part of Tuv Ha’Aretz had meant to them and what they imagined for their CSAs’ future. And though no one seemed about to give up his iPod or trade in her Toyota for a horse and buggy, the hodgepodge of visitors seemed to form a temporary kind of community of their own. As members young and old sat around the table happily eating ice cream and discussing what to do with kohl rabi and garlic scapes, our hostess’s 98-year-old grandmother turned to me and asked, “Are they all a family?”

The members who visited the farm may have been united by their values in an entirely different way than the Amish—but somehow each group’s respect for religion and for the land had brought them to the same place that day. And seeing as that place happened to have fresh fruit and huge tubs of just-melting ice cream, what more could anyone have asked for?

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