Living with Intention...what we eat

The other night I was at a discussion group talking about living with intention and how we treat our bodies.   It has definitely been something I have thought about for quite awhile and totally ties into why I homestead. I think this will be the first part of a series. This one is about the food we eat.

What I eat has been a concern since I was very young.  (That doesn't mean that I was always good about not eating junk).  When I was 18 I stopped eating meat because of the industry and animal rights.... even back then I knew how horrible CAFO's were.  Over the years my thoughts on animal rights have not really changed but have matured. After working in, and burning out of, the animal rescue field I knew where my beliefs were but getting there was not something I was sure how it was going to work out.  My thoughts on animal rights/pets/shelters is a topic for another discussion, lets just say I understand why "no kill shelters" won't work until people's attitudes and sense of responsibility changes and in my darkest days of animal rescue I had/have doubts of it ever happening, faith in humans is hard sometimes when you see what they can do to animals.

Anyway, for me, I realized, that I was not against humans eating meat...it is natural.  What I was against was the treatment of those animals that became our food and the blinders that people wear.  Not until the last couple generations have people started to eat meat they did not know where it came from or even what it was.  The concept of going to the grocery store and picking out a package of meat and not wanting or caring to know its source is just plain wrong, in my view.  I dealt with people with blinders a lot in the animal rescue field and I found that the amount of blinders people purposely wear about where their food comes from is unbelievable.  My thoughts were that if I couldn't have the courage and honor to kill it, I couldn't eat it.  The very least is people (kids) should learn where their food comes from. Chicken is not a square in breading...it is an animal with a life, though sadly a very short miserable one usually - I live in a very big CAFO chicken farm state. I know people who will not eat meat that actually looks like the animal. I also know people that will not eat meat or even eggs that are from a farm but only if it is packaged at walmart...not because of any safety reasons but because they actually do not want to think about the animal the meat came from. A perfect example of blinders.

My concern was at first and mainly for where meat came from and for that I was a vegetarian, with occasionally eating seafood, for about 20 years.  But then I started to learn about what monoculture farming is doing to the land and realized that it is as much of a concern as CAFO's.  The monoculture farming requires an unbelievable amount of fertilizer and that fertilizer not only taints the food but is one of the major reasons for pollution in our waterways.

So I started homesteading and buying primarily local.  The only meat I put in my body is raised by me, hunted by me or someone I know or is from a local farm.  The vegetables are from my garden or local farms and the CSA I belong to...all organic or very close to it.  All my fruit is from a local orchard except for the bit of avocado, mango, banana and citrus - if I still lived in Florida I would grow all this myself but even though the zones are shifting we aren't there yet.

I have really been concentrating on eating whole foods, meaning "real food", real milk (raw), real butter, nothing boxed or canned.  I have learned to can and I have been doing more and more each year.  This next year I hope to double my garden and start providing even more food for the animals I raise here.

The next part of living with intention is (moving my body)...

Shared on http://www.theprairiehomestead.com/2013/02/homestead-barn-hop-97.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ThePrairieHomestead+%28The+Prairie+Homestead%29

and  http://www.backyardfarmingconnection.com/2013/02/the-backyard-farming-connection-hop-18.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:

and:
http://frugallysustainable.com/2013/02/frugal-days-sustainable-ways-64/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:


and: http://www.theselfsufficienthomeacre.com/2013/02/the-homeacre-hop.html