Buy REAL FOOD, Locally

Grass Fed, Pastured Meat and Dairy

Eat Wild is the best website around for those wishing to quickly discover the many benefits of grass fed and pastured animal meat and dairy products. Whether you are interested in saving the world, saving small family farmers and local economies, saving the environment - or "just"saving your health - this is the place to start. Be sure to read through the exceptional information contained on this site. Then get to work and order from one of the sources near you, or find those that ship.

The Weston A. Price Foundation is another exceptionally good and very extensive resourse for discovering the health benefits animal-sourced foods, including raw milk. It also has a good locator page to help you find a Weston A. Price chapter nearest you, with contact information of local chapter leaders who can provide sources for grass fed animal products, including raw milk, closest to you.

If you are lucky enough to live in the Northern Illinois area check out this resources page for all manner of exceptionally good quality, responsibly grown, local vegetables - and grass fed meat and dairy, plus lots more from responsible local producers. Note that this group holds monthly meetings, to which the public is welcome.

Farmer's Markets (Primarily For Produce)

The USDA has a locator for farmers markets around the country so long as you know at least part of the name of the market.

In Illinois, this is an excellent source for locating farmers markets.

CSA's (Primarily For Produce)

Local Harvest provides an easy tool for locating CSA operations.

WHY BUY LOCAL?

Should you need any more convincing as to why you need to buy as much of your food as possible from local sources check some of the articles check Food Routes.

AUTHENTIC FOOD - BEYOND ORGANIC

A Seal of Quality from a Farm Near You, excerpted from an article by Eliot Coleman which appeared in Mother Earth News, now avialble here.

The label “organic” has lost the fluidity it used to hold for the growers more concerned with quality than the bottom line, and consumers more concerned with nutrition than a static set of standards for labeling. “Authentic” is meant to be the flexible term “organic” once was. It identifies fresh foods produced by local growers who want to focus on what they are doing instead of what they aren’t doing. (The word authentic derives from the Greek authentes: one who does things for him or herself.) The standards for a term like this shouldn’t be set in stone, but here is what I would like for growers to focus on:

• All foods are produced by the growers who sell them.

• Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs and meat products are produced within a 50-mile radius of their place of their final sale.

• The seed and storage crops (grains, beans, nuts, potatoes, etc.) are produced within a 300-mile radius of their final sale.

• Only traditional processed foods such as cheese, wine, bread and lactofermented products may claim, “Made with authentic ingredients.”

• The growers’ fields, barns and greenhouses are open for inspection at any time, so customers themselves can be the certifiers of their food.

• All agricultural practices used on farms selling under the “authentic” label are chosen to produce foods of the highest nutritional quality.

• Soils are nourished, as in the natural world, with farm-derived organic mattr and mineral particles from ground rock.

• Green manures and cover crops are included within broadly based crop rotations to maintain biological diversity.

• A “plant positive” rather than “pest negative” philosophy is followed, focusing on correcting the cause of problems rather than treating symptoms.

• Livestock are raised outdoors on grass-based pasture systems to the fullest extent possible.

• The goal is vigorous, healthy crops and livestock endowed with their inherent powers of vitality and resistance.

“Authentic” growers are committed to suppying food that is fresh, ripe, clean, safe and nourishing. “Authentic” farms are genetically-modified-organism-free zones. I encourage all small growers who believe in exceptional food and use local markets to use the word “authentic” to mean “beyond organic.” With a definition that stresses local, seller-grown and fresh, there is little likelihood that large-scale marketers can appropriate this concept. – Eliot Coleman