Get To Know Your Food - Part One

 
The more I educate myself, the more I realize how incredibly important it is to know where our food comes from; particularly our meat. Sure, you may have purchased it at Kroger, Walmart, or Pic-Pac, but how did it get there? What about the farm that produced it? How were the animals raised? Were they free to roam about or were they caged? Were the cattle raised on grass (the food they would naturally consume), or were they given grain? Were the animals injected with steroids, antibiotics, or growth hormones to get them to market faster, and will those drugs ultimately end up in the bodies of our families?

Well, I'm going to take the guess work out of it, at least for my family. A couple of weeks ago, we made the trek down the farm that produces most of the meat I now purchase, as well as a great deal of the vegetables. This is a photo of me hanging out with the pork I'll be consuming later this year. I saw the living conditions of the pigs, and learned that they often let themselves out of their pen and roam about the farm, wallowing in mud puddles, or seeing what they might want to get in to. I learned that they are not given antibiotics, steroids, or growth hormones. They grow at their own pace and they have a good life. The piglets are born in a nice sized pen that is clean (well, as clean as a pig pen can be) and gives the mother and piglets room to move around. Sure, they ultimately end up on someone's dinner plate, but the life they have leading up to that time is happy, and more importantly...healthy.

I buy very little meat at the grocery store now, but when I do, I research the company that produces it. I no longer trust all those pretty little labels, with a photo of a barn and a happy sun rising up over it. I don't automatically trust the claim of "natural" and "farm fresh", and you shouldn't either.

Trust me, there are plenty of wonderful farm families that live near you, who would just love to get to know you, and introduce you to their farms. It's important to know what you are consuming, and I for one, am going to do my very best to get to know my food!