Community-supported agriculture from the perspective of health and leisure

Abstract

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a rapidly growing movement responding to the global economic crisis. The concept of CSA is thought to have originated simultaneously in Japan and Europe in the 1960s and then spread throughout the USA. In its essence, a CSA involves a direct connection between a farmer and the people who share the risks and rewards of growing and distributing food. The benefits, according to widespread international research, are plentiful: economic, environmental and social. In Hungary, CSA is a relatively new idea and in the last few years there have been not more than five or six so-called share CSAs established, one in the author's hometown. The paper presents how the French variation of CSA (AMAP) was adopted in Szeged, Hungary and how this vegetable community works and what are some of its leisure and health impacts on the author. The paper also attempts to interpret the author's CSA membership from a health and leisure perspective connecting this idea to health promotion and to Blackshaw's ‘liquid leisure’ concept.

Keywords:

• community-supported agriculture
• liquid leisure
• health promotion

Acknowledgement

This manuscript has greatly benefited from the comments of reviewers for this Journal.

Notes on contributor

Bernadett Kis is a psychologist working as an assistant professor at the Institute of Applied Health Sciences and Health Promotion at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She has been a member of a CSA initiative for two years.

Notes

1. Associations pour le maintien d'une Agriculture paysanne, Associations for the protection of small-scale farming.

2. However, Hungarian CSAs bear the hallmarks of an AMAP, there are some modifications so that the system fits more to the Hungarian conditions (see later for example of payment conditions). Throughout the paper, I am going to use the term CSA and vegetable community to refer to my CSA.