The Importance of Eating Earnestly

I have for a long time been vaguely dissatisfied with the food that's generally available in supermarkets. Most of it doesn't really look like food, and the stuff that does is shipped in from some other hemisphere and doesn't taste like itself. Then there are all the problems with the meat industry. I didn't really know about those problems until fairly recently, but I felt them.

My early summers were spent in rural Iowa, where my dad grew up. Back in the 70s and early 80s, my grandparents' neighbors had working farms, and there was a pleasant, farmy smell to the air. That was before the caged animal feeding operations moved in. Nowadays the air in my dad's hometown smells like poison, and the well water must be filtered or it will eventually kill you.

This vague dissatisfaction was pretty much my entire reaction to the national food problem until a few years ago, when my wife discovered the books of Barbara Kingsolver--first her fiction, and then her more activist work. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle led us to read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which led us to Joel Salatin's Everything I Want to do is Illegal. And trips to the grocery store became...complex.

We knew too much.

Nothing looked like food to us anymore. It was all wrong, even the "fresh" produce. (Asparagus in January!?) We couldn't look at grocery store meat without thinking about what happens in the CAFOs and the meatpacking plants. We didn't want to give that stuff to our kids. We wanted to eat real food that had been grown by real farmers on a real farm, but where would we find it, especially in the middle of a Michigan winter?

Then we discovered La Vida Local.

Okay, we still couldn't get fresh local lettuce in January (there's a limit to Julie's miracle-working), but we could get ground beef that had been allowed to act like a cow all its life, cheese that didn't have a z in it, and that had been made right here in Michigan, and all manner of other stuff made or grown or raised less than a couple hundred miles away. It takes a little extra planning, but it's so worth it. The food tastes more like itself, it's better for you, our grocery dollars stay in Michigan (which, face it, in this economy can't be a bad thing), and there are fewer ethical questions about whether our dinner is wrecking the world.

Now that spring is here, we're going to farmers' markets (one in Pontiac, one in Royal Oak), and we've got a nice crop of veggies started, but we're still using La Vida Local. Watch this space for our thoughts about the various products that we've tried and meals we've cooked with
La Vida Local products.

I'll leave you with a thought from Pixar's Ratatouille: "If you are what you eat, then I only want to eat the good stuff." You can find the good stuff right here.