During pregnancy, along with all the physical, hormonal, emotional and life changes, I made endless efforts to get healthier.
I'm not an expert, not by a long shot, and I'd still rather go camping with the bears than work out.
But.
I did find out a LOT about our American food, and our American food system.
It was pretty shocking.
Most of those apple pies your buying instead of making are riddled with chemicals designed in a lab that are mysteriously "just fine" for human consumption - without evidence to back it up (and in some cases, with scientists getting fired when they find during studies that many of these chemicals and processes make rats very sick). Meanwhile the cancer, obesity, heart disease, well, you name it and it's on the rise. And these are food related disorders. I think, sure, we eat a lot more than we need to as Americans, but mostly, we eat crap. Total crap. I'm talking anti-freeze in your ice cream, I'm talking manufactured (not in any way grown) blueberries in your cute little muffins, I'm talking ammonia washed meat in your burger, I'm talking petroleum based food packaging. I could go on.
But I won't.
Because it's not really what I wanted to write about today.
All that stuff is just the precursor.
So you know why I eat like a 'freak', as has been mentioned to me here and there when I'm caught eating my cut fruit that I cut myself and put in my little glass container instead of buying the prepackaged little plastic containers of processed fruit.
I am the proud participant of a CSA in my area.
And I love it.
I paid a subscription fee up front, though some are set up so that you just pay a weekly fee for a particular amount of product.
Anyway, so I paid an up front fee which gets me what ever I want that my farmer has available whenever I want it. During the winter it was only meat, a few eggs here and there, honey and some pretty amazing apple cider vinegar. I can't wait for the plant harvest though.
So some things I noticed about the meat: it tastes like real meat. If you don't know what I'm talking about, just go buy your regular meat, then buy one single pound of grass fed 'organic' meat. Make burgers out of each, and see what you think of the difference. I was totally shocked. I didn't think there should be such a difference, so I looked it up to see what other people were saying, and I read, heard all the same things I was thinking.
Amazing what a little grazing on unfertilized lawns will do for the meat of a cow or a lamb.
And the lamb is more amazing than I ever thought. I had a bad experience with regular store bought lamb once a while ago and thought all lamb was an acquired taste and just EWWWW. But, as it turns out, it's just all in the way the dang lamb was raised!
I think we have such a separation from the ideas of where our food comes from that we can't even imagine that the processes in which it is raised would make such a huge difference in the way they taste when we've bought them from the supermarket then cooked them at home.
Oh, and a CSA is "Consumer Supported Agriculture", so it is where you, the consumer has a direct product to purchase relationship with the farmer. No middle man, no extra rules or fees for either you or the farmer. In most cases, you can tour the farm and in every case, you can ask the farmer anything you want about his/her processes. This is a truly great way to get pure products and keep our American farmers sustained financially and within their community. It isn't that difficult to find them, you just have to look and make a few phone calls or send a few emails. After that, it's easy and completely rewarding.
In some cases, I've heard of people buying part of a dairy cow so they can have some of the raw milk produced by the cow. This is one way of getting around all the governmental red tape that hovers over the milk industry - it is also another example of direct product to purchase relationships.
Just something to think about.
Link of the day. This time I'm going with more than one.
http://www.nectarhillsfarm.com/
http://bigskyfarm.org/
http://www.gaiasbreathfarm.com/
http://www.foxfallsfarm.com/index.html
http://www.otsego2000.org/farmersmarket/
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