Thursday, 2 July 2009

Do you know where your food comes from?

I have no idea. Well, that's not entirely true. For the last year-ish I've been paying more attention to what I eat. I realized early on that I actually give a shit about the quality of food that I consume. The "happiness" of the animal seems to directly relate to how good it tastes. Pasture finished steaks seem more tender, more... "steaky" than the factory farmed equivalent. Free range, organic eggy-weggs are tastier than the cheap ones with neon yellow yolks.

Did you know that carrots are actually incredibly sweet? The last time Lindsay and I got standard supermarket produce the veggies all tasted like freaking cardboard in comparison. Flavours from the Farmers Market are over all, more intense, more yummy, and more happy.

Also, more expensive to be sure! But I don't think that it's prohibitively so. We still manage to eat healthy and sufficiently on around $100 a week. Give or take, depending on what's on the meal plan.

I think a big reason that people don't go for the organic, free range, hippy dippy, granola crunching, yuppie food is that they're nervous about it. At least, that was the case for me. I simply assumed that the cheap, mass produced, crap that I'd always been buying was all that I could afford. I assumed that the flavours in organics couldn't be so much better that what the super store could come up with. I was afraid to take the plunge and change. I didn't want to interrupt the status quo. I know better now. Switching to happy food didn't disrupt anything. I've simple switched supermarkets to one where I can chat with the supplier. Where I know that the people running the place care as much about the product as they do about the purchaser, not the purchaser and the profit like other places seem to.

I don't know, maybe I'm just being elitist. Maybe the improvement in quality is some sort of placebo effect that I'm getting from the additional cost of organics. Either way, I still think I'm getting the better end of the bargain.

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