Vote with Your Fork! State of the Pantry Report

As we continue our efforts to disassociate ourselves from agri-business, believing it to be harmful to our personal financial and physical health as well as being harmful to the well-being of others (financially, physically, and environmentally), we are moving more and more of our purchases over to niche markets.

Here are our goals, in no particular order, with the over-arching consideration in parentheses.

• to shun misery-laden production practices (personal ethical health, preservation of small parcel agriculture[usually]),
• to shun edible-food-like products that have factory origins (personal physical health, personal financial health, regional environmental health*).
• to shun farming practices that rely on the intense use of petroleum-based fertilizers (personal health, regional environmental health).
• to shun foods laden with antibiotics and insecticides (personal physical health, community/regional environmental health).
• to source our food from as nearby as possible (community financial health, preservation of small parcel agriculture),
• to purchase it directly from the farmer or as close as we can get (community financial health, preservation of small parcel agriculture),

Here is our State of the Pantry report:

Goals Met:

• Beef -- Misery-free grass-fed beef born, raised, and butchered in one set of pastures within our region. Purchased directly from farmer.
• Eggs -- Our own misery-free yard-fed hens give us plenty of these.
• Flour -- Organic regional flour milled by locally-owned flour mill.
• Salad Greens -- Part of the year we grown our own. Part of the year we buy Earthbound mass produced. We don't feel good about the latter. More later.
• Apples -- Purchased directly the non-organic, but watershed activist, farm 2 blocks away.
• Milk -- Purchased from locally owned grocery chain who buys it from the dairy 8 miles from our home and sells it to us in recyclable glass bottles.

Goals Unmet:

• Chicken -- yes, well, obviously I could raise and butcher my own, but that is not going to happen. Purchasing misery-free yard-fed hens from others is really expensive. I found some at the local butcher (by butcher, I mean a man in an building that is a killing house for animals, not the employee behind the counter at a store that sells quasi-edible-food-like products), but they were pricey. Right now, we do without it, but it is so handy for a quick stir-fry. What to do . . .
• Salad Greens -- During the off-season we end up buying the Costco bulk tub of Earthbound farms, which is an organic industrial producer of baby salad greens. The greens are machine-harvested and trucked across the country. There must be a better way. Build a greenhouse and grow our own? Find a local grower of winter greens and hire them to grow for us? I need to study up on what winter greens could be grown here (note to self - review this part of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and see what she grew).
• Other Fruit -- planted 15 new fruit trees this year. Must get up to speed on spraying and storing.
• Bread -- organize time better to bake all of our own, not just some.

This started when I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. My goal then was to take a look at my shopping cart and to alter the proportion of what I used to call manufactured stuff versus real stuff, but what I now call quasi-edible-food-like products versus food. My first goal was half and half: no more than half the cart could be manufactured stuff. At the time, this seemed like an honorable goal. Looking back now, I am ashamed that I would allow that much quasi-edible-food-like products into our home.

When the half-and-half goal was met, I budged it over to 25%/75%. When that became doable, I pumped it up to only 1-2 indulgences per shopping cart (Heat-and-Eat lasagna or pizza for Crisis Nights). This means that I am buying mostly ingredients and only a little bit of ready made. Canned goods count as food, as does bread and other items that involve minimal manufacture. This may sound odd, but if it is something that I could make at home, it's okay to buy it. If is something that I would have no idea how to make (Twinkies, soda pop), then I probably shouldn't be eating it. I don't make tortilla chips, but I could, so those are allowed, as are beer and wine by the same token.

Then I read Omnivore's Dilemma and realized that it is my civic duty to get as far away as possible from the agribusiness food chain. Last spring we got chickens and doubled the size of our Victory Garden. This year I aim to bake more bread and can and freeze more produce as well as to whittle away at the "Goals Not Yet Met" list.

Are you changing your food habits? How so? Why? Are we part of a tide change? or is this a passing fancy?

*environmental health -- the packaging, the shipping, the trucking. All of these are wasteful of natural resources and are wasteful of my money. When I buy the food, I am paying for the packaging and for the long-distance voyage. Why would I want to do that?