When you sit down to eat a meal, do you ever stop to think where your food came from ? I think it is important that all of us have the ability to trace our food back to its place of origin.Until the advent of the supermarket in the middle of the 20th century, you couldn’t go to one place to buy all of your food. Everything was specialized. Face-to-face contact with your local farmers was common place. It was normal.
You had to wait for the milkman to come by once or twice a week with your milk. Milk came in sealed jugs with the the cream still on top. Homogenization, the worst thing dairy men did to milk, didn’t start until the 1960’s. Best-before dates were a week to ten days at most. Now with ultra pasteurization, milk can keep for several weeks to a few months. It may be void of all its healthy enzymes and have little leftover besides sugar and protein, but it will keep ! Small dairy farms with a dozen cows are a thing of the past. They have been replaced by large factory farms with the robotic milking of up to 500 cows at a time. This is the new standard. The idea of tracing where your milk comes from is virtually impossible unless you are willing to buy into a cow share from a privately owned farm which many people are now doing.
Fruits and vegetables were once bought at local farms in the summer months and the excess were either frozen or made into soups and jams, because in winter months very little can be grown in climates where the temperatures dip below freezing. In those days everything was seasonal. You couldn’t eat apples in the spring or asparagus in the winter. Now when I make my weekly trip to Whole Foods, my strawberries are from California, blueberries from Ecuador and my Garnett yams come from Mexico. Transportation has come a long way in the last 50 years. The problem with this is that the produce we are eating has been picked 4-6 weeks prior and has lost a lot of its nutrients. Fruits and vegetables have their highest nutrient content as soon as they have been picked and unless they are either eaten or flash frozen right away, their nutrient content dwindles dramatically.
How many of you go to a butcher shop to buy your meat ? Have you ever thought to ask the butcher what farm your ground beef came from and how it was raised ? It is rare that they will be able to tell you. When I first began to buy grass fed beef at Whole Foods, I made a point of asking the butcher which farm and in which state my meat came from. He gave me the name and I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to trace it back to a website through the Internet. It is clearly not local, which is not ideal, but it is better than the alternative. Currently, 98 percent of meat, fish and poultry purchased in North America comes pre-packaged from factory feed lot farms. If you have watched any of the documentaries available over the last 10 years (Food Inc, Fed Up, King of Corn) then you will know that purchasing this type of meat is far from being your best option from a health and morality standpoint.
We are living in a fast paced world. Everyone tries to cram as much as they can into their day. Kids typically eat on their own when they get home from school and the parents eat later at night once the homework and extracurricular activities are complete. Food now needs to be convenient and is viewed strictly as fuel to get us through the day. The idea of savouring our food is a lost art. I find this very disconcerting. Try and make a point of sitting down to eat with friends and family members as often as you can and take the time to enjoy your food and the people you are sharing it with. It promotes a sense of togetherness and communication that today’s families are sorely lacking.
In my next blog I will discuss the benefits of consuming beef and dairy from grass fed cows and why feeding cattle genetically modified (GMO) corn and grains is so harmful.