Changing What I Eat - Part I

There comes a time when an idea that has been brewing and formulating in your head finally becomes a conviction.  You become ready to put the idea to action.   Well, after years of careful thought and having been influenced in no small way by the writer and owner of Polyface Farms, Joel Salatin, I've decided to no longer purchase, for my own preparation at home, ordinary, industrially farmed meats.

What this means is that I'm looking to buy meats from the smaller, hopefully local farmer. He may be organic and he may not–it's not so much the USDA "organic" designation I'm interested in as it is how he's farming his animals.  I want to support the farms that are raising animals the old way, pre-CAFO (CAFO stands for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation).

I think that farming animals should involve grass and sunshine and humane treatment.  I don't think the big factory farms are real participants in this.  Yes, I believe you should treat the animal I want to eat humanely.  Just because he's destined for my table does not mean he should be crowded into feces swamped pens where he can barely move, or exist in the kind of crowded, pathogen loving conditions that necessitate the use of antiobiotics, or be fed and bred to be so meat and top heavy that he cannot stand up or have his beak cut off so he doesn't cannibalize in his close quarters.  I hate to tell you this, but much of the meat on grocery store shelves comes from animals raised in places that can be described in this way. 

I've gotta give Harry's Whole Foods credit for being different.  When you shop for meat there, you will find a rating system on the packaging that gives a fairly good description of the farming conditions.  

We're out of touch with food in this country, whether that be animal or vegetable. This is ironic because we are well fed to the point that obesity is epidemic. My involvement with community gardens has had many pleasures but also a few concerns, like when I meet people who are afraid of the rich, brown earth and all the bugs and worms.  They see this life-sustaining dirt as dirty, something to fear, something full of germs.  And I get concerned when I see vegetables left on the vine to wither away and rot.  Food is a commodity.  It's precious.  Unlike plants, which make their own food via photosynthesis, we rely upon plants to produce our food, whether that be a potato or the grass that becomes the meat on the cow.

Unfortunately, most of us think of food as something that comes from a faraway place, a never-never-land, a place we will never see.  Indeed.  And in that faraway place food is being produced with the aim of volume and profits, but at what price? If animals are merely numbers, if soil and water are not concerns, if nobody cares that tomatoes have no taste anymore, if the salsa flavored potato chip is the closest we come to a vegetable, then what's to become of us? 

I'm not trying to elevate my concerns to the level of religious fervor even if they do arise from a certain judeo-christian ethic, but I'm not afraid to ask:  is there something wrong with the food system in this country as we know it?  Here in Georgia, 21.3% of our children are considered "obese".  That ranks us nationally at #2.  Also, here in Georgia, 28.7% of adults are obese.  That ranks us nationally at #17.  The prevalence of diabetes in this state is at 9.7%.  This is an increase of 131% since 1995.  

So, in the big picture, my little act of having a new definition of what meat I will allow myself to cook at home may in fact be a little act when viewed in the big picture.  But little acts add up.  And that's the best I can do.