Remember the old days in Vancouver?

Do you remember the days of yesteryear – where mashed potatoes, heaped with gobs of fat, and a giant hunk of meat, perhaps with a few peas on the side served as dinner?   Are you still living in yesteryear?  I was.  Yesterday.  Then I read Skinny Bitch.  Now, I have to say, since then, I’ve learned quite a bit in my attempts to refute their claims.   If you are going to read this, (if you’re not, just skip this paragraph) you need to differentiate between their common sense arguments, and others common sense arguments. What is common sense to them, may not be common sense to everyone else (or you).  The footnoted claims to fact are another story – almost entirely true from what I can tell.  :(

Okay, back to yesteryear.  :)   This blog is going to be the place I chronicle our change to a healthy diet and ‘clean’ living approach to food.  I’m going to mix up my own common sense, with the ‘whole food’ movement, the ‘local’ food movement, organic food, but most of all – ethical food. I am (at this point) prepared to dowse myself in chemicals from the skin of vegetables – Yes, I may get cancer.  However, I am not prepared to support an industry that mass-produces meat to the point of chemically-inducing growth, causing animals to grow malformed because of cramped living quarters, and feeding them a life-long regiment of antibiotics so that the meat stays healthy enough to serve my kids.  Animals that are grown in areas that any breathing person would consider unnecessarily painful and slaughtered violently – the mercy of death coming wayyyy to late in the process.   that is plain unethical.

Let me say that I do not blame the industry (mostly), or the people who work in the slaughter barns.  What else can you expect when in order to provide their families, they have to produce thousands of pounds a meet, every day?  And the people that kill the animals, are forced to do so at such a rate, that the ‘kill’ part of the process sometimes misses the mark – so that the barns are full of screaming animals, half slaughtered, half alive.  And the worker has to move on to the next animal to hopefully make their mark this time.  It reminds me of war (please understand that soldiers deserve our undying support and devotion), in that the people who are forced into this position cannot help but be changed by it.  What a sad situation!

Does that mean I am going to stop eating meat?

Personally, I want to cry every time I look in my freezer and see the piles of frozen meat in there.  So yeah, I haven’t eaten meat in about a week, except for fish.  But no, in general, I hope that this weepy-ness wears off with a certain time of the month, and the knowledge that there are farms out there from whom I can buy more humanely produced meat.

Recently I’ve met another Mom from my kids’ school and in getting to know each other, I found out what “Applied Biology” means as a university field of study.  Oddly, it has little to do with biology, and a lot to do with the relationship between peoples and their food source.  The topic is wide and varied and insanely interesting!  Anywho, she subscribes to the local-food, ethically produced (of course), and primarily vegetarian diets.  So I’ve been picking her brain about how exactly to cook in this way, and also which farms I may have access to around here that produce food in an ethical manner, that I could, in good conscience feed my family.   More to come on this in future posts.

For now, I have an announcement to make:  We are going ETHICAL.  And it aint’ going to be easy.  All of us that have changed our diet from gluten-’normal’ to gluten-free, know how difficult it can be to read all the ingredients, source out the safe foods, and cook an entirely different menu (if necessary).   And I’m doing it again.

Times are Changin’!

I hope you’ll join me, at least to cheer me on, if not to join me!  I remember how much work it was to change our diets from gluten to g-free, and now, I’m going to change our diets again – new grocery lists, new meals to plan, new ideas to conjure up, new everything!  Oi!! I need a nap.

Thanks for playing along!!

PS – have any of my readers been down this path before?  Which path?  How long ago?  Any locals (vancouver)?