Food Matters Making new food choices
Making the decision to eat foods grown locally, to eat with the seasons, to eat compassionately and sustainably, usually arises out of a desire to leave a lighter carbon footprint on this already trampled planet. Locally grown organic produce offers such benefits as consuming less fuel, putting less stress on the land, providing food not contaminated with pesticides and genetically modified crops, and supporting local farmers who don't have the vast resources available to agribusiness.
For meat and dairy eaters, animals raised in humane conditions, such as pastured chickens, cattle, and other creatures, have not suffered as they grow and are not slaughtered in cruel conditions as are unfortunates animals raised on factory farms and mass produced for the sole benefit of massive agribusiness' bottomline. Local, organic, pastured animals also decrease carbon foot prints.
So, those are great reasons with substantial research to back them up. All that's left to do is locate food that meets these criteria. For many Americans, the task might seem insurmountable. After all, we are conditioned by the ever-increasing vastness of big-box retailers and jumbo supermarkets with their dizzying array of convenient and inexpensive food. (I often think about the world's poor, including those in my community and country, and wonder how they would react to a visit to an American supermarket. Boggled.) But, the tide is turning, and the good news is that more and more U.S. citizens are fed up with being force-fed unhealthy, inhumane, and destructive food choices.
Food matters.
In future editions, I will offer research about the state of food and educational videos to help readers make informaed decisions about what they eat and where they get their food. I will provide ways to find local, affordable, seasonal produce, meat, and dairy. Life Spirit Style is not extreme and not judgmental, except about corporate farming, toxic food, animal abuse, and environmental destruction. If you eat meat, I respect that. In our house, we eat poultry and dairy. We share with most citizens a long experience of buying food mindlessly and cluelessly. But, now we have digested some vital facts about food and we can't undigest them. So, we are in no position to sanctimoniously judge your process.
Life Spirit Style just wants to help.