Cage Free, Free Range, and Pasture Raised, oh my!

Sound like the egg section in your grocer's dairy aisle? We thought so. The Story of an Egg, a short film part of a larger project titled "The Lexicon of Sustainability" takes a closer look at agriculture by utilizing varied modes of communication and sharing such as photo collage, animation, hand-written typography, and social networking to navigate words and ideas.

Click here if you'd like to watch The Story of an Egg thanks to PBS.org. Filmmaker, photographer and writer, Douglas Gayeton, was the director and photographer for this amazing production. Check it out. Tell your friends about it. We heart (re)thinking.  Thank you, PBS!
 

Foodie Memory: This is What Sara Said

I grew up spending most of my time outside. Creek swimming, family hikes, fort building, camping- “Go outside” was the answer to any suggestion of boredom. To go with my generally outdoorsy upbringing, my family engrained an environmental ethic and awareness into both me and my brother which has stayed with both of us for our entire lives. Discussions of energy use, climate change, pollution, preservation, development, and sustainability were common. My parents did, and do, believe these issues were and are important, and it was not unusual for conversations to drift to these subjects over dinner. 

But over what dinner? While my mom always meant well, supplementing veggies from the garden or farm stand with items from the one lone little grocery store in my town, environmental concern never really drifted from the conversation down to the dinner plate. As we kids got bigger, schedules got busier, and more and more cheap and processed food made a presence in our house. Grab it! Go! It didn’t take long before the family with such strong environmental values was eating in a way that regularly undermined their own beliefs. I went away to college with the eating habits I had developed. While I’d eat fruits and vegetables, I didn’t really think about if they were organic and more often than not I subscribed to the collegiate concept of dinner: If it comes from a packet and can be boiled and sauced- it’s dinner. Cheap meat on the Foreman Grill? Dish up.

Once away at school, I took environmental class after environmental class- and more and more I was faced with the conflict between the conventional food system and my values. Food miles, the treatment of animals, water pollution, energy use, endocrine disruption and the bioaccumulation of chemicals and antibiotics, the more I learned about the conventional food system, the more uncomfortable with my eating habits I became, but little change was made. Graduate school led to even more conversations about food and ethics and sustainable development. Although I had been exposed to a great deal of information about the industrialized food system and importance of alternative models while in college, it wasn’t until I was working through Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation for Environmental Ethics that I came face to face with the hypocrisy of my eating and consumption habits. I could no longer make excuses for my consumption habits clashing directly with my environmental values. I promptly dropped meat entirely and began the transition to a primarily organic diet.

The shift to a more ethical and sustainable diet has been a relatively easy one. Having access to organic produce and on rare occasions, ethically and humanely raised meat, through LFFC has been wonderful and allows me to better reconcile my environmental values with my diet. It’s not necessarily practical for many of us to completely eliminate our impact on the environment, but changing your food, making the simple choice to pick food produced in a way that does no harm to the workers, land, water, and animals that create it, that’s an easy choice and simple change and one I’m glad I’ve made.
Thank you, Google Images and CSA Files for included pictures. 

Fooding Part-way Down Memory Lane and All-the-way Back.

We, the CSA chatter-people, were doing just that the other day—talking about food (as we always do) and (this time) what we remember about it growing up, you know how it has or hasn’t changed for each of us. Because we were in our office space, we circled back to favorite meals we had as kids after we touched base about dietary staples growing up. If we’d had this conversation offline over a jovial cup of coffee at a local brew house, we would have just allowed the conversation to happen itself back to childhood memories rather than circle back, but at the end of the day, we are grown-up professionals now.

Truth: some of my favorite things to eat as a kid were the processed, prepared and preserved meat and cheese meals laden with preservatives and additives that now make me sick to my stomach. Microwavable chili. Abnormally large cans of beef stew. Hot dogs. Frozen, like delivery, pizza. Bread pockets of scalding meat and molten cheese. Vacuum-packed plastic trays of seemingly always unequal amounts of meat, crackers, and cheese. Crispy cookie cereal. Anything non-perishable, sugary, and cheap. (Blue) box (blues) macaroni and cheese was always a treat at home, and mozzarella sticks were the holy (edible) grail at horse shows and events from the food vendor.

I only realized the cliché-ness of my experience when I was getting tattooed recently, and the artist asked after hearing I’m vegan, “so did you watch all the necessary documentaries?” I laughed and said yes. She was right. However, and there is always a however, I’m glad I did—cliché or not. I only started questioning my own food when I switched my dogs to holistic food after learning kibbles and bits more about the dog food industry’s misleading labeling. Some defining personal food moments were cliché no doubt, yet the assumed societal commonality of my experience didn’t dilute my later comprehension and enactment of change. Thankfully.

In our collective experience and pooled memories, it seems the changes in our moral eating and eating morale, began after the questions did. Where does the food we eat come from? Where does the chicken in my chicken Caesar salad come from when I’m at [insert chain or independent restaurant here]? What was the factory or farm like? Were this chicken’s friends nice? And, what about the dairy products in the bright orange cheese powder for mac n’ cheese—were the cows involved treated well and free of hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs? As kids, this is what was missing—doing the food meta. Food was food was food was food. Some things like tomatoes came from a garden or nearby farmer’s field, and the rest of it, the boxed stuff, only came from the store. We didn’t ask questions about the who, what, where, when, and why that were involved. We didn’t understand the relationships between sourcing and silverware or money and its monopolization of our food choices at home, school, work, and play.

Despite the apparently generic packaging of my vegan-branded food transformation, I’m still happy with it. I would still pick its similar main ingredients comparison out at a store, despite it’s lower retail price and lower budgeted advertising. That is, I would still pick it out if said store were local and organic like a CSA share.

We’re in alignment about a few things in the CSA office. While administrivia may not rock our socks off, working to provide and improve access to some of the best organic veggies in our locality does, and is awesome, worthy work. We’re in agreeance about it, we’ve aired it out, and we’ve even circled back to it plenty of times. We come by our work through varied disciplines, but we love it. We are always happy to talk about (and eat) good food.

Thanks to Google Images for all pictures.