Live in Health, Locally

The easier way to know where your food is coming from is do buy local. I highly recommend seeking out articles and books about the meat industry and how food is grown and shipped in the United States, but we don’t always have the time to curl up with a good, heart-wrenching read. Instead, try and get your produce from your local farmer’s market. Talk to the growers, ask if they use pesticides (if you’re concerned about that), buy produce that’s actually in season in your climate. If you don’t have a local farmer’s market near you, when you’re at the supermarket, see if the produce sold there states where it’s from. Try and pick items that are grown in your state. when it comes to your diet being picky is a good thing.

Organic, Free-Range, and Farm Raised: Which is Healthier?

As for meat, don’t be fooled by the “organic, free-range” label. The standards for what constitutes “free range” are silly-it means that instead of being held in the stocks they can “roam” in a 3×3 space. Sounds quite luxurious, does it not? Eggs are the same story-don’t imagine that these chickens are flying all over a green field eating corn to their heart’s delight. They’re probably still pumped full of hormones and left to waddle in their obesity in their slightly larger prison, trying to peck at one another with their phantom beaks. A jail is still a jail, no matter how big the cell. Again, if you’re fortunate enough to have a local farmer’s market, ask around! I saw plenty of local farmers who were offering beautiful cuts of lamb, beef and chicken, as well as softly speckled eggs in cardboard containers. Farmers who are proud of their way their animals were raised (and slaughtered) have nothing to hide.

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I am a huge health advocate, and I’m also a strong believer in the old saying “Knowledge is power.” I wanted to start this Healthy Living series in this blog to arm readers with as much knowledge as possible, so that you all are able to make educated choices around your health and well being. That way, even if you’re making poor choices (I’m looking at you, smokers), you know all of the full ramifications around those choices. To kick things off, I wanted to wax poetic about one of my favorite subjects: food. More specifically, where the food we Americans eat comes from. I’m hoping that bringing this subject to light will make you think more thoughtfully about the food you’re putting into your body and how you might make better dietary choices.

Happy Cows Come From…

As a vegan, I realize I have a biased perspective on the meat industry here, but really, if you do enough reading and research, the numbers don’t lie. When I ask my meat-eating friends and family how they can still eat meat knowing how animals are raised, treated, slaughtered and so on, they often reply “I just try not to think about it.” I can only shrug, because living in denial is a hard thing to shake people out of. But when you’re biting into a hamburger, do you know where that meat has come from? Meat like beef and poultry are raised in huge feedlots around the country. You can’t take a drive down I-5 in California without seeing cattle literally stacked on top of one another. When you’re biting into a juicy steak, are you confident in the USDA’s inspection of the meat processing plants? Read a book like “Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the US Meat Industry” and you may never look at beef the same way again. Things like cattle not being stunned properly and skinned alive to rotted meat simply being cut away from carcasses and sent on through inspection with flying colors. Graphic and disturbing? Yes. But necessary to know if you’re really interested in knowing about what you’re eating.

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