I just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver this weekend and found it to be one of the better books I've read in the past five years (other than Girls Gone Mild, by Wendy Shalit). Stefan and I came to the conclusion that we would like to buy as locally as we can, and organically as we can...we can't exactly move to a farm and grow everything ourselves, but we can reduce our footprint somehow, and this is how. Not only that, but with all the statistics in there about cows with hormone injections, and 70% poultry in our nation contaminated with bacteria (produced from CAFOs--big feed lots--the company's won't state this directly to consumers (DUH) but assume that everyone cooks their meat well enough that it 'should kill all of it'. Not to mention the fact that cows (once slaughtered and "mushed"--my technical name for it) are given to chickens and other poults as feed and then the cows get their feed of oats and chicken poop (their natural diet is
grass, other foliage). Sorry, I thought I wouldn't mention the gross factors, but I can't help it...Stefan and I found a meat locker, some direct farmers, an organic health store that sells hormone-free milk, and I am really looking forward to farmer's market in the spring--we're going for it. Read it and weep, for the family farms who are quickly going out of business for the huge lots whose animals rarely live to see the light of day once in their lives, are artificially inseminated because they've had even the most basic instinct bred out of them for convienance, and for all the animals who live, eat, and then die in their own feces. Think twice before what goes in your mouth! Here's their website: http://animalvegetablemiracle.com/, which has great pictures of their produce and farmland, followed by a picture of the book's cover. The other picture is the next book I'm reading (only on page 2!) called "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn (author of Money, Possessions, and Eternity). Happy reading...and eating...
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