Day 94 - "Make Friends with your Farmer"

In an article from the April 2011 of Experience Life, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl talks about the importance of buying food local, even while some have backlashed against it. Some writers, like James McWilliams, believe that Big Agriculture is the "only practical way to feed a big world" and that the "idea of knowing your farmer is a romantic, softheaded notion." McWilliams argues that "know-your-farmer food is elitist, expensive, and unrealistic for certain growing regions and many specific foods."

Grumdahl, however, talks about how the small-farming industry has been completely devastated since the end of WW2. Now, when customers buy small-farm grown products, they are not only buying the products but are also acting as "a venture capitalist, funding the start-up costs of many small-scale farms." While buying organic foods may increase your grocery ticket, you can be a lot less nervous about the quality of the foods and can enjoy products much more delicious than those produced by a factory farm. Grumdahl recommend trying out websites like www.eatwild.com in order to find local sources of foods like eggs, meat, and produce.

Grumdahl's family gets their egg products from a local farm called Wild Acres where chickens, turkeys, and various breeds of duck, geese, quail, pheasant and partridge are raised on open ranges where they are allowed to roam and graze. Grumdahl says that "once you make the effort to find your own local chicken farmer, you get two great benefits: one, chicken that's much better than the stuff everyone else is eating; and, two, the knowledge that you've done as much as is reasonably possible to avoid products churned out by an increasingly unhealthy factory-farm system."

Today, many restaurant owners are getting their products from local farms. Although the products cost more in a depressed economy, the restaurants continue to buy the products in order to help the small farms survive in the economic downturn. As one chef said, "That's the way business is supposed to work. You take care of your customers, and your customers take care of you."

Exercise: Well… yet another day of no exercise. For those of you who did a swim workout today, good job. I was just in some kind of funk. Maybe I'll be able to finally get back to it tomorrow.

Eat: Today I want to talk about the benefits of four more vegetables. Celeriac contains fiber and potassium. Celery has vitamin K, vitamin C, folate, and potassium. Chili peppers contain vitamin C as well as capsaicin, which gives them their heat and has strong health-promoting antioxidant properties. Finally, corn contains fiber, folate, potassium, and vitamin C. If you get the burgundy-hued variety of corn, you will also be consuming 350% more antioxidants than the other sweet corns.

Relax: Today I watched the latest episode of The Biggest Loser. I loved it! Just me and my puppy :)