A Song for Garden Season

Here in South Mississippi it's garden time and outdoor activities are eating up a great deal of my time. I'm really pleased with the progress, the garden is shaping up to be the best I've had yet.

This week I'm traveling around to different library branches in our library system with my local Extension Agent, my good friend Stephanie, and we are doing gardening storytimes. I do the storytime and then we make a little growing project using recyclables. FUN! The kids are having a hoot. They love the craft.

In my preps I was looking for David Mallett's "Garden Song" (the Arlo Guthrie version is my favorite) and ran across this youtube. It's perfect for those of us trying to do things a little more naturally.



Curiously, and not to sound prudish, but why do you think this guy isn't wearing a shirt during the filming of his video?

After further thought, I guess I should just be glad that he is wearing pants.

Factory Farms - Not for everyone

Here we have another truly horrifying look at the big business factory farm model in the United States.  

How I wish that awareness of the inhumane and unhealthy ways we produce meat would truly hit the mainstream.  The only thing truly likely to change big business practices is backlash from the consumer and a hit to the bottom line.  As long as mainstream America views humane food procedures as the domain of the "flakes", "granolas", and  "hippies" the big business model will always look to profit over health and safety.  Legislation would help but again big business tends to find work-arounds.

Here's how I've begun to deal with this issue in my life.  How I, trying to be The Practical Omnivore shop for meat.  I've started researching the brands I buy to see if their claims match up with production.  While I don't live in an area where it is easy to find free range anything, I look for companies that promise their animals are grain fed without antibiotics and that that have free access to food and water at any time.  This means I buy chicken that isn't free range but the chickens do not spend their lives crammed in little cages, percolating in their own feces.  I've started eating buffalo from time to time because I trust the production company.  Very occasionally, I buy mainstream meat when I need a certain cut that I cannot buy within my own list of "approved" brands.  I do that with great reservation.

All of this means that I'm also making a choice to spend a little more on most of the meat that comes into my house.  It also means that I have to shop at more than one store for the brands I desire.  Having a small deep freeze helps in this as I can stock up when I'm in the stores and lessen my number of trips and the amount of gas I use.  For me, it's been well worth it.  I find the quality of meat generally higher and I feel much better knowing that my dinner was treated ethically before it came to my plate.


When I watched Food Inc. the "Steak and Taters Guy" was very concerned.  I remember him walking through the room and saying, "I hope this doesn't mess up my hamburgers", one of his favorite meals.  Well, it hasn't.  I've just become much more aware of where my food comes from and learned more about what things I'm willing to sacrifice to feel good about what I eat.  It's a journey I'm still on, balancing cost with what seems right but it's been well worth it.

The Cost of Food

This morning, on the local TV news site, I saw an interesting interview/article about a local High School Government Class. For context, it's important to remember that here in Mississippi, we are the "largest" of the fifty states which is pretty impressive for a state that actually ranks 32nd among the 50 in actually land area. In Mississippi, we are winning the fat race.

I often, sarcastically say to friends, "Mississippi is finally first in something." Now don't get me wrong this is my adopted state and it's been good to me. I have wonderful friends here and love the area. It's like family, I can criticize but you sure better not unless you live here (or have lived here).

How does this relate to the local government class? The instructor took his students on two trips, one to a grocery store and one to the unnamed fast food joint of the Golden Arches. They were tasked in the market to find vegetables for one dollar. Then, at the fast food restaurant they were asked to buy food for one dollar. When they got back to class they compared their shopping.

In the interview about the project, government teacher Hardy James said, "For the first time in probably, in human history, what we eat makes us sick. That's really kind of crazy. And there are government policies behind these cheap, high-calorie, low-nutrition foods."

I'm very impressed that this high school government class is discussing the politics of food. The interview goes onto state that the "goal of the lesson was to get students to question what's in their food and who should be to blame for the spike in obesity and diabetes". Fascinating stuff, at least for me. I'm not one to say the government should regulate what we eat, but it's hardly even a question that the US Government hand in hand with big industry tweaked the way we use food, produce food, and view food. (Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma for a discussion on corn and how it drives our food market.) If you're interested in watching the video of this shopping experiment, check it out Here.