Sustainability and Grocery Store Offerings

I just got done perusing my local grocery store websites to see if anything useful's on sale, and I found a lot of what normally goes for summertime fare here: berries, cherries, melons, peaches, the works.

It's JANUARY! Tell me this is coming from local farms with minimal transport and processing, with nearly no carbon footprint at all, and that no innocent animals/farm workers/children died in bringing it here.

Vegetarians and vegans would tell us over and over again that eating meat isn't sustainable, and that we're ruining the planet. Yet, I don't hear anybody railing against this out-season outrageousness--berries and melons in January...puh-LEESE!

"But they're in the store, and they're on sale, so they must be in season...right?"

Because we eat meat, we're the devil, and this is hell. Never mind that our meat comes from THIS COUNTRY, supporting local farmers, the organic movement, and our so-called carbon footprint is a whole lot less per food-mile than theirs is.

We supposedly lack virtue because we let animal products pass between our lips. We're less-than-human savages. We lack compassion for animals, and the planet, and we're somehow responsible for global warming because animals fart.

MY FOOD isn't coming here from hundreds of thousands of miles away, using tons of fuel to get here, or hoards of gas-chugging machinery, or child labor to pick, or coming from heavily-polluted grounds or waters, or killing innocent animals in the path of machinery, or having to be trucked from one end of this country to the other before it goes bad en route. MY FOOD isn't robbing other regions of much-needed and hard-to-obtain water, land, fertilizer, seed, and chemicals. MY FOOD isn't a by-product of some mega-conglomerate, or some mega-conglomerate's eco-weenie front man in an organic cotton apron, slapped with lots of eco-marketing buzzwords designed to make me feel better about buying it, or even paying extra for it, and MY FOOD wasn't developed in a lab somewhere.

MY FOOD is sustainable--how long have we been raising meat? Vegetation, on the other hand, has been through the wringer as far as greenhouse shenanigans with cross-breeding, so-called yield improvement, gene patenting, more and more powerful insecticides developed and used, and wind-borne GMOs have brought it all to the point that the only way to grow an organic crop of grain is to grow it indoors--requiring electricity to take the place of the sun and wind. To organically improve yields without the use of insecticides or modification, nature must be taken out of the equation altogether. How natural is THAT? How sustainable is THAT?

Meanwhile, all meat had to do is be turned out into a green, unsprayed pasture, given no drugs or hormones, and be able to do what nature intended.

So, meat is nearly a hands-off operation, while vegetation is very, VERY hands-on. With the number of hands eager and willing to get dirty in the name of food production dwindling every day, tell me which one is going to survive the coming fuel wars, the coming power rationing, and the already-happening rampant deportation activities?

There's reasons why crop growing got to where it is now, but the big overall reason is because there's no money in crops unless government puts it there. There's money in ORGANIC crops, sure, but not enough of us are willing to pay the extra price for doing things to make up for the failings.

Meat, on the other hand, has also been infiltrated by government, and look where cows, pigs, and other meat animals spend their very-shortened lives. Pastured, organic meat costs so much more, yes, and for a whole lot less work (or "inputs"), but somebody's got to pay the farmer since he isn't getting the subsidies Farmer Feedlot gets. Farmer Feedlot gets his doped-up cattle to market in what...6 months, if that? Farmer Pasture needs about a year or more to get his cattle up to market weight, and that takes time, land, water, and god knows what else--he's having to make up for the failings of penned-in cattle that are easy to monitor for feed, water, health, etc. while not having to roam the property tracking them down.

Since I live in city limits, and know squat about raising livestock, I'll gladly pay the farmer to do it the old-fashioned way. Sustainable? More so than him having to take money from the government, and produce a crappy product, just to survive. GM fits this bill precisely!

Since I have a back yard, I grow my own veggies. Sustainable? I'm escaping the whole sustainability/marketing question altogether, not needing heavy machinery, killer chemicals, or illegal workers, lack of land and water issues, and the small rodents only have my cats to worry about extinction from. Since crop farmers don't get much subsidies, they've had to resort to chemicals, machinery, illegals, foreign countries, and questionable land/water rights just to survive.

Am I buying and consuming fake meat-substitute products shaped and sold as something they're clearly not, such as tofu dogs, soy cheese, tofurkey, and something called grain roast? No, because it isn't real, and it isn't sustainable because it isn't natural. It's made in some anonymous factory somewhere, and shipped or trucked in, just like all the other processed food is. To make it sustainable is to make it beans again--just plain old boring beans. But to make bean puree out of them, shape it, and hit it with a wand...and pretend a lot...presto! Processed bean curd product. Quick--where is it made? Where do you live in relation to the point of origin? How is it packaged? It's worse when all some people are doing in the name of sustainability and planet preservation is buying fake food in a hybrid car (which took 17 barrels of oil to make, then another dozen or so to ship it here), then hurling insults at local, organic, pasture-raised meat eaters who drive fewer miles weekly than the hybrid-ized do.

MY HALO has fur on it, and I won't be buying any berries or melons until summer. Now who's saving the planet?