choose your food

 

went to a talk by ben hewitt last night with my oldest boy ethan and farmer bob.  i just cracked open this book last night for a minute before bed but as i get into it i will share impressions.  i'm not proud of it but i tend to space out when i read anything with science and with statistics.   but i'm challenging myself to read this book through and to really absorb the information.   will report back. 

here's a short excerpt:

"In Making Supper Safe, Ben explores past, present, and likely future of our nation’s response to pathogenic bacteria in our food, and how it impacts both our health and our right to consume the foods of our choosing. He argues that the greatest danger in our food is not the acute illness caused by bacterial contamination, but rather the systemic arrangements that have consolidated our food supply and hidden its inner workings from view. And he considers the crucial interplay between bacteria and the human body, a field that is exploding with new research and insight."  (emphasis mine)

i came away from the presentation knowing that i can get lulled into making ill-informed food choices and i give up personal responsibility for what i eat especially when i am busy and stressed.  and it's real important for me to keep in touch with these ideas and with people who make them a priority so that i keep my priorities and my ideals in the front of my mind.  does that make sense?  it's not important unless i make it important.  and i want to take responsibility.

i don't think the problem is that people make a conscious decision to support factory farming.  it's that we accept the status quo without much probing. 

here are some related links you may want to check out:

farm forward

factory-farming

eating animals

alternatives to factory farming petition

this weekend i want to try to get to the movie theatre to see midnight in paris.  and it's raining here again but i also want to get my tea garden and tomatoes and basil into the ground finally.

fondly,

liane

kitchen hippie

in the kitchen:

my first batch of kombucha came out great.  if you aren't familiar with kombucha it's a fermented tea beverage.   i think i've added a link for more information about it before but i'll do it again here.

pictured above is some bread i baked this morning with some sourdough starter from my friend jason.

i also wanted to just talk about buying local meat.  i don't buy or eat industrially-raised meat anymore.  if you recall, the final straw for me was reading the book eating animals.  but i know buying local can give a person sticker shock.  here's the thing though..there are lots of ways to make ethically raised meat worth the price.  often times i will just make a meal with less meat.  so a casserole is one way to do this or a salad with a smaller portion on top. 

but here's another example of stretching and using thoroughly.  i recently bought a chicken raised on a small farm in new hampshire for $20.  I baked it and we had a chicken diner the first night.  we still had some leftover meat so i put that in the fridge for another meal.  i simmered the carcass in a big pot of water with a quartered onion, a couple celery stalks, a couple carrots and some garlic to make stock.  if you buy chicken stock in the store it can get pricey so this alone was a big money saver.  i used maybe a quarter of the stock and picked the carcass to make soup.  and i still have a gallon of stock to put in the freezer for later use.  all in all i'm guessing we got 5 meals from that one chicken.  i do understand that all this takes time.  but in terms of money, it's really pretty inexpensive if you use the whole thing efficiently.

ok, now i'm going to take my kitchen hippie/home ec./little house on the prairie apron off.

xx,

me

ps- i also want to share a link to this time magazine article about how real food champions and environmental activists are 2 sides of the same coin.