Food

Eating has never been more confusing.  I recently learned about something called the Paleo Diet.  From what I can gather, it's where you exclude grains and dairy from your diet.  There's more to it than that, but those are the big things.  Basically, you eat meat, eggs, veggies, and fruits.  That's awesome, minus the fact that eggs completely disgust me.  The idea is that we didn't evolve to eat grains or dairy, and that these things are making us fat and sick.  I can see how that could be true, but at the same time, what about most of Asia, which survives primarily on rice (a grain), and has greater life expectancy, better health, and less obesity, than most places?  Obviously this Paleo thing isn't cut and dry.  I won't be trying it anytime soon, despite the fact that about half the people I know seem to be doing it.

I also heard some rumors this week about a farm we get a lot of our meat from.  Supposedly "their practices aren't what they say they are".  OK, so being that it came from a city person, I take that with a grain of salt.  What are we talking about here?  There are some things that city people are going to be less than knowledgeable about when it comes to raising livestock, so I wanted to know just what practices weren't clear.  Were we talking about something awful like growth hormone implants in their steers, or hogs raised in pens, or were we talking about something that isn't as big a deal, like steers penned once a day to eat grain and let back out in their field an hour later?  I still haven't 100% gotten to the bottom of it, but from what I have been able to figure out, it's more on par with the latter.  They buy calves from non-organic sources, and they may be vaccinated.  While the purest of pure eaters may have an issue with that, I don't.  I don't think 2 cc's (so, 1/15 of an ounce) of nasty vaccine ingredients given 18 months before slaughter is really going to taint a 1200 pound steer to any great degree. I don't think I really care where they buy calves from, which they then turn around and raise their way.  I personally would buy a steer from almost anywhere, at a young age, and raise him my way, and feed that meat to my family.  If that makes me less than a healthy eater, so be it.

Also, since Chai is turning a year old in a matter of days, we're considering a milk for him other than breastmilk.  So far, the only other thing he's drank is water (and a little juice at one of my belly dance shows), and we know that we don't have to start him on some other milk at the age of one year, but my milk supply has never been anything to write home about, and we thought he might do well to have some other kind of milk, too, now that he can.  Since Orren and Thak are both lactose intolerant, there is a very good chance that Chai is, too, so I don't want to chance it with cow's milk.  None of my kids have a great history with cow's milk, and actually, neither me nor Thak has a great history with it either.  Basically, in our house, the guys are lactose intolerant and the girls just hate the stuff, so cow's milk is off the table.  Goat's milk is hard to find a reliable source for.  Soy milk is out of the question since most soy is GMO, and even the organic stuff has hormone disrupting side-effects.  That leaves almond milk and coconut milk.  We know Orren does great on almond milk, and Orren's friend Hudson does really well on coconut milk, so it's really between those for which we start Chai on.  I had heard that unsweetened vanilla soy milk tastes the closest to breastmilk, so that's what we got for him.  The things people have said to us about our choice to give him almond milk have been really interesting.  Almond milk has too much sugar, coconut milk comes in cans sealed with BPA, and has some other ingredient that people say is bad.... The list goes on.  As far as consumers go, I'm a fairly informed one, and this crap blows my mind.  At some point, we had to just shut out all the argument over what was good and what wasn't, and make a decision based on what worked for Orren, because since Chai is Orren's brother, odds are good it'll work for him, too.

Food has become a mine field lately.  Navigating a grocery store, or even a farmers' market, and trying to make heads or tails of what's in front of you is harder than ever.  Does it have harmful ingredients? Is it local?  Is it organic?  If it's not organic, is it GMO?  What, if anything, was it sprayed with, and when?  Is non-organic local meat from small farms really any better than the feed lot stuff in the store?  Joel Salatin tells us local foods cost more since most small farmers are working without subsidies from the government, and he's got a good point there, but sometimes you have to buy what you can afford.  This is an issue.

My $24 pot roast from last week is my favorite recent example.  No, we don't usually buy $24 cuts of meat.  We don't have that kind of money.  Usually, we buy cheaper cuts (like the ground beef, bacon, or sausage that our local farmer sells for $7-8 a pound, and in 1 pound package), just because it's what we can afford, but every now and again, I enjoy a good roast, and last week, we bought one.  It was good.  It tasted way better than anything from the store, and the fact that it came from a steer that was raised just up the road, free to roam on pasture for his whole life, made me feel ok to eat it, unlike meat from the store, which makes me feel guilty because I know more than I want to about factory farming.  Even so, the fact is that that same size of roast could have been bought at Publix for maybe $12-15, yet it cost me $24 from my local farmer.  There are a lot of people who can't afford a $24 cut of meat no matter how hard they scrimp and save in other areas.  In that same Joel Salatin article, he said that for most people, clean eating is simply a matter of priorities, and for many, that may be true, but for some, it's not.  For some, the only priority is getting enough food on the table to feed their family, on their stressed budget, because in case you hadn't heard, the economy kind of sucks lately.  This is what keeps factory farming in business.  People have to eat, and a lot of them don't have a ton of money to spend on it these days.

I love food.  I really do.  Who doesn't, right?  It's just become exhausting lately, though.  It seems like the list of foods we should not eat grows every day, and that nothing is what it appears anymore.  Food should be simple.  It should be delicious, raised right, and not make us sick.  I'm not sure how we accomplish that in today's world, but I am sure that we need to.