Quick Hit: The last rabbit kill.

Forgot to get the photos for today, so instead I'm just going to do a quick post, after all, this particular post doesn't really need any new photos. Last night I did the last butchering of rabbits that's going to take place here on the homestead. It was a killing that needed to happen, but I still am glad that it's the last one unless I'm going to be teaching people.

Herbie was the last rabbit on the homestead because he wasn't a rabbit we could let move on to another home. We'd tried to give him almost 6 months to recover from the back leg problems he was having, but he never did recover. It seems he may have injured his spine while playing and jumping around in the hutch, and just never was able to move properly after. It's a thing I've been putting off hoping he'd magically get better and we'd be able to pass him on, but it just wasn't happening.

Physically, skill wise, it was one of the easier killings I've done. Both of us were calm, and the physical process went perfectly. On an emotional level, it just confirmed that we made the right choice not to do rabbits anymore even if we were going to be able to stay in the homestead. The question now is, how do I continue to eat ethical meat, and stay healthy? Mostly, by eating less meat, and only buying from ethical sources.

But to be honest while we're in the process of selling the house and under financial duress, we're probably going to have to compromise and just eat what we can afford, while eating as little meat as we practically can.

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Wandering animals, and ethics vs feelings.

It's another rainy day with no great photos to share, and fortunately I've been thinking about ethics again. Before I get there though, we have a couple things going on around the homestead. First the turkey is missing this morning, and there's no exploded poof of feathers. I suspect she's going looking for a tom that will give her what she wants since I'm clearly not doing it for her. I hope she comes home soon, and we'll keep you updated. The second thing is, somehow in the weather changes the hutch with Dawn and her daughter ended up open. On the big up side, when I walked up and picked dawn's daughter up, she didn't run anywhere but back to the hutch and let me put her back in. The benefits of having well socialized rabbits. I guess being outside in the rain wasn't as much fun as she thought. Below the cut, let's get on to some thinking.

Quick Hit: Fed Up Documentary

Last night the Lady of the House and I got to see the documentary "Fed Up" and really enjoyed it. The movie is really good from the food science perspective, focused on the day to day "normal" food chain. It has a lot of information the Lady of the House and I already knew, but is well worth knowing. Even if you know everything it is very well presented, and is a documentary I think everyone in the USA and other developed countries at the very least should watch.


http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/home

Sometimes you have to eat the pork chop.

Today we're going to talk about a topic that we aren't necessarily fond of, and that's the reality of food when you leave your home. The quote in the title comes from The Compassionate Carnivore by Catherine Friend. To paraphrase a chapter in her book, sometimes you can't eat perfectly, and you just have to eat the (deep fried) pork chop. If you want a good read, that's a book well worth it. It was one of the books that have informed the basis of our philosophy. I want to discuss that a bit today since it became a focus for the Lady of the House and I as we traveled to a convention to sell her art.

At home it's relatively easy for us to talk about eating well. We have a yard full of greens to eat, not all of which we planted or even have to work for. We've built our lives at home around trying to eat well, and while we aren't perfect we do well. When you leave the house though things HAVE to change. Restaurants aren't geared around ethical eating, or even healthy eating most of the time. Some areas are worse than others of course, but even in good areas most food in our price range isn't ethical food, and if we're out with friends at a restaurant, or at their house we aren't going to examine every aspect of our meal, demand ethically raised and cared for food, or not eat.Whether it's because we need to eat, or we want to not be anti-social, or not offend our friends when they want to feed us. Sometimes we just have to eat what's in front of us. That's exacerbated when traveling outside of our "home range" as we did last weekend.

When traveling one can only bring so much food with you on a practical level, and what you bring has to be non perishable. That means preserved most of the time. We brought a fair amount of good food with us, and tried as much as possible to eat it, we even did fairly well. That said we also ended up eating fast food 4 times over the course of 4 days. In all 4 of the cases it came down to we'd either been working, or traveling all day long, and just needed some hot food. I'm going to be honest, I didn't even think about food ethics for 3 of them, I just needed food, and I needed it now so I didn't fall asleep while driving. So where does that leave us, given that we try to live better than that? The big thing in my mind is, making small changes in our every day lives matter more than occasional lapses. It's part of our philosophy of, small changes are better than no change. Obviously, the better we can do, the happier we'll be with ourselves, but if we're going to maintain this dual life, sometimes, we'll just have to eat the pork chop.

More rainy day thoughts: Why we started, how we will continue.

Another day of rain, this time it's a significant down pour. As we call it in this area a Noreaster, in Texas we'd call it a gullywasher. It's not the best sort of weather for a 45 - 50 degree day, but it'll help the water level for the area which is low for a number of the reservoirs. The chickens aren't getting time out wandering and free ranging because I don't want the high winds that have come with it blowing them around the yard and getting them injured or lost, unable to find their way back to get dry and warm. They objected strongly as I left this morning for work, I could even hear their objections in the car.

Since without photos there isn't much to talk about homestead side other than that the Lady of the House still hasn't given birth to the Critter, and we're going to be doing another work day Saturday, I'm going to have another day of thoughts on Homesteading.

Pensive on a rainy morning: Food ethics and farmers

There are no good photos to share right now due to being busy yesterday and waking up with the speed of a glacier this morning, but that's ok. This is going to ramble a bit because it's a train of thought, so bear with me please. While I obviously am focused on our homestead I've been thinking about food ethics in a broader perspective. One of the critiques of the food movement that I can't really discount is that not everyone has the opportunity to grow their own food, and if you've been around the USA you know there are places you can't get fresh produce. Not you can't get organic, you can't get fresh anything at all. Now the food deserts can change, but there are things that can't change.

Barring a catastrophic rearrangement of the world, people are going to live in cities. As long as people are living in cities there will be a large number of people, perhaps even a majority of people that can't grow their own food in sufficient quantities to survive. This is especially true if we build our cities to discourage car use, and focus on public transportation which I happen to believe is an ethical and practical necessity. The consequence of the existence of cities is that there are going to have to be farmers that are larger scale to produce, and if we want it to be more ethical there are going to have to be ethical farmers.

We think about the ethics of animals, and the ethics of our own food a lot. The thing we need to think about is how to improve the ethics of readily available food, for everyone. The catch is, there are costs to that, and we can't push those costs solely off on the farmers. Farmers are already in a precarious position, and to get changes in the practices of farming there is going to have to be money available to help with the changes (note, there is some), accessible training made available to everyone that wants it, a lot more farmers, and people are going to have to be able to make money doing it.

I suspect many of you have seen this article from the New York Times.  It's not a new article titled "Don't let your children grow up to be farmers". Some of the interesting information comes from this USDA report which points out that most farms have significant off farm income, and this USDA farm income forecast that shows that most farm income is in the negatives, the median, not the mean. Now some of this certainly comes from the increasing number of small farms that as the USDA notes, "barely has enough agricultural activity to meet the requirements to be considered a farm," which includes homestead farms, owning horses, and similar situations. The other thing they noted is that most of the off farm incomes were high, often in management. To me this is part of an increasing divide between the rich and everyone else in terms of food access. I'd link to an article about that, but there's a lot of them to read through and have opinions on. Suffice to say I think that a food gap relating to health, and safety of food rather than luxury food items can't be sustained.

Coming back to the topic at hand, how do we make sure that as we transition to more ethical food, that we don't rely on slave labor to execute. There are a lot of examples. This NPR Article has some basics, this article from Take Part has some interesting information about the prison labor use which I'd call slave labor, and an article from the Guardian about migrants living and working in criminally bad conditions just scratch the surface of the truth of slave labor in our food. That's discounting the issue of a lot of our imported food coming from areas with water shortages, effectively exporting water.

To that end we as a society need to recognize that sufficient, and healthy food is and should be considered a necessity. We should be dedicating public funding to insuring that our farmers are not living in poverty. This needs to come with the recognition that farming is risky both in terms of safety and financially if you have a bad year, or two and can't sell crops. Now, food is one of the most profitable businesses out there, everyone needs it. We just need to figure out how to transition the money from large, monocrop agriculture megafarms to smaller farms without putting the entirety of the burden of paying for the costs of more ethical farming on them.

I do wonder how changing how antitrust laws see farm conglomerates would change things.

I think the short of it is, beyond personal, local support we need large scale government support for ethical, more sustainable farming that's ecologically and personally focused. We also need to stop supporting slave labor practices forcing lower prices on those who do the work themselves. I don't have all of the solution, but in the end, to get ethical food, we can't do it for free. We have to recognize that the costs come from somewhere, and that it can't all come out of the farmers.

P.S. We also need more than 0.1% of our population to be farmers in the USA.