Dirty Eating...

I just finished reading this book called "Skinny Bitch" which is ostensibly a book about healthy eating. While it is certainly compelling in its health reasons to go completely vegan, I took the chapters about the horrors of the meat packing industry most to heart. I followed this with some delightful videos on goveg.com about how cruelly animals we eat are treated (really really horribly) and have decided to think more about where we are getting our food from.

One of those heartbreaking videos:


Don't misunderstand me... I don't really have issues with eating meat. It's paying for meat that has been raised in small dirty cages, tortured, boiled alive, skinned alive etc. that I don't want to continue endorsing with my hard earned dollars. I actually take especial issue to thoughtless militant vegetarians/vegans because it seems both dramatic and vaguely ostentatious. Dealing with a real food allergy makes a lifestyle choice pale in comparison. I'm not sure how serious I want to go with this. Always vegetarian? Sporadically omnivorish with locally raised meat? Fish only?

Bobby, with his Celiacs disease, really puts severe restrictions on what we can or cannot eat. While I would like to avoid eating meat it's not very realistic for him to. So I'm looking into locally raised, farm grown animals for any beef or pork... but can't seem to find any decently raised local chicken providers. You can obviously purchase "cage free" eggs but it doesn't seem to guarantee that the chickens ever see the light of day. Apparently it's quite possible they still spend their lives in piles of dead chickens and poo. Thankfully Lawrence has some eggs available from local farms. However I am much more eager to get a few hens for our land. This is not a short term solution as it will take almost a season for the hens to start laying, and I can't get any chicks until spring. But, I've lived with chickens before and think it would be a fun, green project. Bobby doesn't believe me, but farm fresh eggs are soooo much more tasty.

Militant vegetarianism/veganism is annoying in one way, but militant meat eating is annoying for the exact same reason. Bobby's recent argument "I like eating anything that fought for it's life" is a good example. No animals we are eating actually "fought" for their lives. We didn't go out and hunt them down and carve the animal ourselves. Cultures who did do this ate meat far more sporadically than we do. The animals we are eating were raised in a cage only slighly bigger than they were, given hormones that make their bodies grow fatter than their systems can support, given antibiotics to combat their horribly dirty surroundings, beaten, moved in uninsulated trucks to the slaughterhouse, and if they were lucky blasted through the skull with a metal bolt before being skinned and boiled. We never see these animals. Even 100 yrs ago meat eating was a special occasion, it took some time to grow the cow or the pig you had for the holiday meal. I think eating meat that was raised on a local farm with a minimum of drugs (although I don't disagree with using drugs to heal a sick animal) and who lived a healthy life before being taken to a slaughterhouse where it was humanely killed is fine. Meat eating should be sporadic and more of an event than an every meal thing. Paying a little more for meat that has been raised this way will keep your meat eating in check. I found this local farm that sells meats at our grocery store that I think we'll purchase from.

I know I'd like to avoid eating cows, pigs and chickens. I'll consider sporadically eating local meats. I think I'll allow fish, provided it's caught in the wild. Cheese is my one big hang-up. I loooove cheese (but have always disliked milk) and know from experience that vegan cheese is disgusting. Cooking with gluten flours is bad enough, I can't imagine what horrors I would face with soy cheese. Ironically Bobby is beginning to think he is lactose or casein intolerant, as when he drinks a glass of milk in the morning his tummy is upset and he has celiac like reactions. I vaguelly remember reading that casein is very similar to gluten and so it's fairly common to be allergic to both. I'd already planned to switch from regular milk to rice milk (again, milk is eeewwwey and makes my tummy hurt) but will be totally sad about losing cheese. Apparently milk cows are pretty horribly treated as well. The milking machines cause sores and puss gets into the milk supply. They are fed drugs to keep them lactating far longer than they normally would. The book also argues that milk serves to fatten a baby cow into an adult cow in a matter of months and thusly cannot be good for our bodies. It argues that cultures with dairy as a staple in their diets are more likely to have osteoporosis than cultures who do not have dairy as a staple. So for health reasons and ethical reasons eating dairy products seems to be a bad idea. I'm going to look into locally made cheeses, paying slightly more will make it appear less frequently in our diet.

The book also rails on unnatural additives like aspertine in soda and caffine. While I understand the issues with odd chemicals and additives I'm not sure I'm ready to give up coffee. It suggests replacing soda with good old fashioned water. I'm making an attempt. I drink several sodas a day and generally end up with a pounding headache around 2 o'clock. It occurs to me that it's probably because I'm totally dehydrated from my morning coffee followed by a soda. Having had kidney stones in the past I'm betting I tend towards dehydration.

Finally the book rails against sugar. Also, an understandable thing to avoid. I don't eat a ton of suger thankfully (except in prepackaged foods and coffee). I'm going to order some agave nectar from amazon which apparently has a very low glycemic index (good for diabetics Vicki!) to use in recipes. I've actually had several GF recipes call for this but I can't find it locally.

I'd like to get the book "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver about her families experiences purchasing local and growing their own food.