Do you know where your food comes from?

* Mom, you may not want to read this blog entry. I'm going to talk about food sources. Consider yourself warned.

My mom is the type of person who doesn't want to connect the dots between a hamburger and ... a cow. There, I said it. Hamburgers come from cows. I'm sorry but it's true. I used to be one of these types of people as well. When I bought chicken in a Styrofoam container from the grocery store, all I wanted to see was a clean, skinless trimmed piece of meat. I didn't want to consider where the meat came from.

The reason behind this fear was that I didn't want to know about the animals that were feeding me. Fast forward to today. I've learned a great deal about industrial meat sources and local meat sources. I know what I'm getting when I purchase either. I know that the generic beef I buy in a grocery store comes from a corn-fed cow that was on antibiotics and lived a short life in miserable conditions. I know that the grass-fed beef I buy from my herd share comes from a cow that grew up on pasture (which by the way, cows are physically supposed to eat grass and not corn - they can't tolerate corn, which is why they're given antibiotics) and was treated humanely. It also was part of a much larger farming system in which all the animals helped close the farming loop - the chickens come in to clean the fields and spread manure after the cows are done grazing, etc.

Before I started the 100-mile diet I had seriously considered becoming a vegetarian. But now that I know the meat I'm eating comes from animals who were healthy and happy, I feel better about consuming meat. Maybe some day I'll stop eating meat. But for now I'm happy being educated about that which I am consuming.