All Organic! Or not...

Where does the food you eat come from? If you open your refrigerator do you know where that milk came from, that lettuce, hamburg, what about your ketchup, and let’s not even open that drawer and inquire about that sandwich meat (truuuust me, you don’t wanna know).

For most of my life I never gave a woot-toot about the food I ate or thought about where it came from, what it ate, or the conditions in which it was raised, all I cared about was ‘does it need more salt’ and ‘will there be any left for seconds’. But then I read books like Skinny Bitch, watched movies like Food Inc., and saw that commercial with the dreaded footage of a fork lift driving OVER a live cow (ugh). Those words and images are permanently burned in my brain.

About two years ago, right after I found out I was pregnant, like most first time preggers, I vowed to eat better with more fruits and veggies and for one shopping trip I declared an all organic diet. I shopped for dry goods in the two organic shopping isles at Hannaford and bought an organic chicken, the milk and cheese products I have bought for years already claim to be natural and use no artificial hormones. Then I got to the check out – HOLY, I had maybe a half a cart of food and the price tag was almost double what I normally pay with a rounded shopping cart. So needless to say, my all organic phase petered out quickly.

I realized not only can I not afford to eat all organic, but let’s be honest, it’s not realistic either, we love our Velveeta, Doritos, and Pepsi way too much. But what I can do, and have done, is pay more attention to what I buy and feed my family. For example, a few weeks ago, we bought half a cow that was fed all natural and wasn’t run over by any forklifts! When I do groceries now, I buy at least one chicken/pork item that is organic, my vegetables I grow and can in the summer and when those run out I buy one or two frozen veggies that are organic, yogurt - organic. I figure if I can make one meal a week that is all organic and throw in a couple all natural side dishes once in a while, I am doing better than I was before.

SOO, although I can’t tell you where everything in my refrigerator came from, ate, or where it was raised, I can tell you that this little freezer here is full of all natural beef, born and raised right down the road and in the door there is organic deer meat which was born and lived on an undisclosed location of a small island in Maine.