fabledshadow replied to your
Sep. 25th, 2019 01:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2l6ROTl
fabledshadow replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your…”
This is a Serious Topic and all i could think reading that last paragraph is “the paper’s gone to a Better Place”
By which i mean to say i’m in the camp of ‘make friends/allies locally and source as much as you can there because shit is going to hit the fan and thinking on a nationwide scale is going to be unneeded soon’ so like …i’ll just be over here in my Oscar the Grouch trashcan lol
LOL, old paper is happier as soil, surely?
I also plan to do some papermaking, so I have actually been hoarding paper to recycle myself. (I want to make paper with the waste from flax processing but without a Hollander beater I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I just met the person who owns the old mill on the stream by the farm and I want to ask him about setting up a tiny water wheel in his millrace so I can make hydropowered drop hammers. That’s probably a bit of a pipe dream, though.)
But like… I mean, I’m becoming a big advocate of coming up with local sources for your food web etc., and you’re not wrong, if shit hits the fan you’re better off the shorter your supply chain is.
But I’m really trying to be hopeful about it, and positive, and my point is, paying closer attention to possible local sources for your life needs can only have a good impact. The Troy Farmer’s Market just won a big award, it’s about 20 years old and the city has transformed around it and partly because of it, it’s such a huge focal point for the community– and I want that, but more inclusive, I want American cities to be able to have inclusive local cultures, and I don’t know how to do it but I know part of it is not just blindly buying eggs from Wal-Mart that come from mistreated chickens tended by human trafficking victims halfway across the country because that’s the cheapest price you can get. That’s not how to eat, that’s not how to have a human society, that’s not how to care for yourself or your people.
Knowing where your garbage goes, knowing where your food comes from– that’s my point. And even more positively, it’s just nice to be in tune with your countryside, you know? What’s in season right now? Who has autumn blueberries, what a treat! You appreciate stuff more when it’s in tune with your environment, I think. Local flowers, not hot-house, are so much more beautiful, and incidentally you’re not endangering the health of Colombian flower workers and spewing carbon into the air from having tropical flowers flown to you. Like, it’s layers, here.
If your guiding principle on food shopping is not “who can give this to me for the absolute cheapest price”, but is rather “what is this, where did it come from, and did everyone handling it make a living in the process? did it live well and did it die well? was it produced sustainably?” then there’s a lot less incentive for the cost-cutting self-inspection bullshit that gives you human fingers in the sausage and so on.
And yes, if there’s any kind of destabilization, living somewhere where there’s a robust local food web is going to put you in a lot better position for, like, continued survival, than living somewhere that only has imported food. I’m definitely not not thinking about that.
Also, as an aside, I keep commenting on people’s “time to go vegetarian!” posts to harp on about how vegetable markets aren’t any more sustainable, but I should point out for the record that I ate a vegetarian dinner last night and am not actually some kind of meat fiend. (Tomato soup, all from stuff from the farm. It was super nice.) I do think Americans eat more meat than they need to, and that meat ought to be an expensive thing you build meals around and sometimes do without rather than the bulk staple so many American diets treat it as. (I’m relying on one half of a chicken for all my meat needs this week. It’s plenty, for two people!) But just discarding meat from the diet without giving any thought to the whole system is not going to solve any of our larger problems, so. Lettuce listeria will make you just as miserable as the e. coli in uninspected pork. And the horrible things Driscoll’s workers go through do nothing to convince me that berries are somehow more virtuous than chicken! I’m super tired of “meatless mondays” level of zero-introspection into the foodweb, is all. Demonizing a foodstuff instead of investigating the whole system isn’t going to help one tiny bit at all.
fabledshadow replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your post “meanderings0ul replied to your…”
This is a Serious Topic and all i could think reading that last paragraph is “the paper’s gone to a Better Place”
By which i mean to say i’m in the camp of ‘make friends/allies locally and source as much as you can there because shit is going to hit the fan and thinking on a nationwide scale is going to be unneeded soon’ so like …i’ll just be over here in my Oscar the Grouch trashcan lol
LOL, old paper is happier as soil, surely?
I also plan to do some papermaking, so I have actually been hoarding paper to recycle myself. (I want to make paper with the waste from flax processing but without a Hollander beater I don’t know how successful I’ll be, but I just met the person who owns the old mill on the stream by the farm and I want to ask him about setting up a tiny water wheel in his millrace so I can make hydropowered drop hammers. That’s probably a bit of a pipe dream, though.)
But like… I mean, I’m becoming a big advocate of coming up with local sources for your food web etc., and you’re not wrong, if shit hits the fan you’re better off the shorter your supply chain is.
But I’m really trying to be hopeful about it, and positive, and my point is, paying closer attention to possible local sources for your life needs can only have a good impact. The Troy Farmer’s Market just won a big award, it’s about 20 years old and the city has transformed around it and partly because of it, it’s such a huge focal point for the community– and I want that, but more inclusive, I want American cities to be able to have inclusive local cultures, and I don’t know how to do it but I know part of it is not just blindly buying eggs from Wal-Mart that come from mistreated chickens tended by human trafficking victims halfway across the country because that’s the cheapest price you can get. That’s not how to eat, that’s not how to have a human society, that’s not how to care for yourself or your people.
Knowing where your garbage goes, knowing where your food comes from– that’s my point. And even more positively, it’s just nice to be in tune with your countryside, you know? What’s in season right now? Who has autumn blueberries, what a treat! You appreciate stuff more when it’s in tune with your environment, I think. Local flowers, not hot-house, are so much more beautiful, and incidentally you’re not endangering the health of Colombian flower workers and spewing carbon into the air from having tropical flowers flown to you. Like, it’s layers, here.
If your guiding principle on food shopping is not “who can give this to me for the absolute cheapest price”, but is rather “what is this, where did it come from, and did everyone handling it make a living in the process? did it live well and did it die well? was it produced sustainably?” then there’s a lot less incentive for the cost-cutting self-inspection bullshit that gives you human fingers in the sausage and so on.
And yes, if there’s any kind of destabilization, living somewhere where there’s a robust local food web is going to put you in a lot better position for, like, continued survival, than living somewhere that only has imported food. I’m definitely not not thinking about that.
Also, as an aside, I keep commenting on people’s “time to go vegetarian!” posts to harp on about how vegetable markets aren’t any more sustainable, but I should point out for the record that I ate a vegetarian dinner last night and am not actually some kind of meat fiend. (Tomato soup, all from stuff from the farm. It was super nice.) I do think Americans eat more meat than they need to, and that meat ought to be an expensive thing you build meals around and sometimes do without rather than the bulk staple so many American diets treat it as. (I’m relying on one half of a chicken for all my meat needs this week. It’s plenty, for two people!) But just discarding meat from the diet without giving any thought to the whole system is not going to solve any of our larger problems, so. Lettuce listeria will make you just as miserable as the e. coli in uninspected pork. And the horrible things Driscoll’s workers go through do nothing to convince me that berries are somehow more virtuous than chicken! I’m super tired of “meatless mondays” level of zero-introspection into the foodweb, is all. Demonizing a foodstuff instead of investigating the whole system isn’t going to help one tiny bit at all.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 03:08 pm (UTC)I wrote a post a while back explaining what the different things on the labels mean-- or maybe I reblogged a thing-- but the point is, there's a Lot of Shit on egg carton labels and a ton of it is legally meaningless, so I don't blame anyone for being super confused about it!!
I only recently learned that the thing they tell us to look for as the sign that the chickens are eating a good diet-- orange yolks, a sign of beta carotene from ingesting grass-- has been meaningless since the 90s when commercial producers realized you can just add annatto to the chicken feed and then all the yolks are orange hey presto. Meaningless!
no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 05:01 pm (UTC)Any source for eggs that's not a factory farm is going to be better, being not dependent on human trafficking and whatnot. if it's not a large operation, then the hens are probably treated relatively humanely and have better conditions than factory battery farms.
The labeling on egg cartons is confusing; a small farm may or may not be reusing other farms' cartons (that is of various legality in various areas; we do, on our farm, because it's fifteen cents a carton to buy them new and margins are so goddamn slim that that's crucial. we just put our sticker on, which is what everyone else does here too, and it contains the information that's relevant to our specific eggs).
It's just great to opt out of the large commercial distributors if you have a choice. If you're spoiled for choice, then you can start comparing, and look for things like organic certifications (which may or may not be meaningful to you) or industry-specific labeling like "pastured" or "free running", neither of which legally mean anything but which in practice are significant to other egg-producers, mostly.
But really, anything that's from a shorter supply chain is likely to at least opt out of the big problems with the overarching System, which is a clusterfuck. (That's not to say that small family farms are always paragons of purity and virtue, just that large commercial farms are almost definitely dens of iniquity, so.)
no subject
Date: 2019-09-26 05:28 pm (UTC)