Sunday, October 7th, 2007

I recently blogged about our new food challenge to purchase all of our food necessities from our local farmers market, produce stand and a few items from whole foods. We have been doing fairly well on staying true to this plan with the exception of this week. One of the biggest challenges with staying on task is planning. For example, if I don’t get up early on Saturday morning and go to the farmers market, it throws off our whole week of groceries. I then have to purchase more items from Whole Foods and this means it is a little more pricey to keep up. On top of that, everything is fresh. This is good but also causes a shift in the way you have to prepare and plan our meals. When I get home from the grocery shopping, I now have to spend about an hour cleaning vegetables and chopping them if needed for upcoming meals. This saves time day to day but means a longer process on shopping days.

All planning and timing aside, this is a really fulfilling time and Jared and I have enjoyed cooking, meal planning and entertaining more than ever before. It has caused us to slow down and spend more time really enjoying what we are cooking. Everyday we are leaning more and more towards the “Slow Food Movement” and this has been a good kickoff to a possible next step. Eating out has become an almost non existent activity as we are limited to places that purchase and prepare food the way we do at home. However, in a crunch, many places offer vegetarian dishes and we love our sushi.

One of the main reasons we have taken on this challenge is because of our love for animals. I have toyed with the idea of going all vegetarian before but to be honest, I believe that God did provide some animals for meat. Plus, we like our proteins. The next reasons is because we want to be aware of where our food is actually coming from, how it is raised or for vegetables, how it is grown. At the farmers market, we have the opportunity to speak with the actually farmer in most cases. If we want, we can even visit their farms to get a better understanding of how they grow their produce.

Meats are a little bit trickier as we are limited to what is available locally. This means we have to purchase a lot of our meat and poultry from Whole Foods. This also means that we are having to trust Whole Foods to stay true to their policies regarding meats they sell and trust that they have visited and approved the farms they purchase meat from. In our modern culture, local butcher shops, serving local meats, have gone somewhat extinct. The meats and poultry that you purchase from your chain grocery store tend to come from meat plants and the conditions animals are raised in are less than humane in my option. Read this great blog posting by Elise at Simple Recipe going into more detail on “Knowing your meat.”

Our main goal regarding meats is to purchase them from local farmers if at all possible. We also want to ensure that the farms are allowing the animals to be free roaming or free range. If you take a few minutes to read over articles on the internet regarding “Free Range Meats” you will see that there are some negatives to this but in my opinion, the positives for the animals outweigh them. Meats tend to be a little tougher if they are free ranged because the animals are allowed to roam and act on instinctual behaviors. Most animals in commercial meat manufacturing don’t have the option to go outside or move much at all.

The way mainstream culture is changing, future generations are going to lose more and more understanding of natural food as convenience and processed foods rise. The changes in this arena over the last 30 years have been dramatic. What will happen over the next 30? This is why I recommend supporting your local markets, local farmers and enjoying the foods you are preparing. Not only will you have satisfaction from supporting your local community but I bet your body will actually feel better as well.

comfort food

I’ve been planning on making banana bread for about a week now. I decided at work that tonight was the night. All the baking made me hungry for an extra special treat and a coke float hit the spot. I enjoyed a thin mint as well. Obviously, I am missing Jared.

There is a little history regarding the picture of Abby. It was taken at the ROMA Food Festival in Italy. The coke cost us 5 EURO and it wasn’t even cold. However, we took this picture for Dad to prove that we still enjoyed it. Money well spent Dad, money well spent.