Well, first let me say that I'm the last person you would ever expect to be farming. I'm lazy. I wasn't raised on a farm and I don't have anyone in my family who farms. I have worked in the IT field my entire career, not the corn field. Plus I'm lazy.
But something changes when you have children.
Computers are simple. The quality of their performance is directly related to what you put into them. We call that "garbage in, garbage out". It's not the computer's fault you told it to do something stupid, it's yours.
So what am I putting into my children?
- My love and affection in their hearts? Absolutely!
- A good education in their minds? We will call it a "work-in-progress".
- A decent roof over their heads? Yeah, it keeps the rain out.
- Clothes on their back? A constant battle, but yes.
- Good, healthy food in their stomachs? Ummmm, I don't know....
Where do I get healthy food that is safe for my family?
Sure, I can get them a diet Coke with their Happy Meal. But is that healthy food? What do you call healthy? Do you measure it by calories or carbs? or is it cholesterol? What about sodium? How about "organic" food? Can't I just add a vitamin pill and be fine?
It's no wonder Americans spend so much money on weight loss programs yet we are still getting fatter and fatter as a country. I have been overweight my entire life. I still am. I grew up in a culture of fat, lazy people who cram obscene amounts of calorie dense, nutrient deprived food into their greedy little triple-chinned mouths while sprawled on a couch watching TV commercials about a magic pill that can help you lose weight without exercise or changing your diet. Oh yeah, and smoking wasn't bad for you either.
I want to feed my family high quality, healthy food. This is what I want:
- I want my beef to come from a steer who lived a happy life grazing fresh, green grass free from any pesticide or herbicide, who had never been given any antibiotics or hormones, who was slaughtered humanely, then was processed in a clean environment, was not treated with ammonia, and had no fillers or by-products added.
- I want my chicken to come from a bird who lived a happy life as a chicken, not as a fat blob sitting in it's own excrement, who did not receive any antibiotics, was never fed arsenic, was slaughtered humanely, processed in a clean environment, was not "mechanically separated", and tastes like chicken, not mush, when I cook it.
- I want my tomato fresh, ripe from the vine, juicy and full of flavor, without any pesticide or herbicide, and grown in rich active soil.
- I want my hamburger to be from one cow, not 100 different cows. (Some of which might not have even known each other. Scandalous!)
- I want the sugar in my food to be sugar, not high fructose corn syrup.
- I want to be able to look at my food and recognise what plant or animal it came from.
- I want to know that the farmer who produced the food was able to make a fair living, that farm workers here or abroad are not exploited, and that there are no "losers" anywhere in the system.
- I want to know that the food is produced by methods that create soil, not damage it.
- I want to know that the food's production was not overly reliant on fossil fuels.
- I want tofu to be the only food that tastes like soy. Soy should taste like soy, not like everything else.
- I want to know that I am not slowly poisoning my children or dooming my future grandchildren with ADHD, autism, or some horrific birth defect.
Well, I've looked high and low and I can't find any of that. Apparently clean, safe, healthy food is about as easy to find as an honest politician. If you want guarantees on the quality of the food you feed your family then your going to just have to produce it yourself.
I started learning by trial and error, mostly error, in the summer of 2008. I'm still making mistakes now, but I'm still learning. I barely produce a tiny fraction of the food my family consumes, but it's always a little bit more each year.
This blog will be a place to record and share all of these trials and tribulations, the successes and the failures, the common sense wisdom and the hair-brained ideas. Read at your own risk, some thoughts may be contagious.
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