Hi everyone!
Thanks to Umpa, TooSweet and mouseissue for the nice welcome.
I'm now fortunate enough to spend a lot of my time in France so a lot of what we eat comes from the farms, literally, just next door all around us. Our chicken and pintade comes from Bernoir who is just across the lane. Our fresh eggs come from Petit Poulet who lived just down the end of the lane. In fact, virtually, everything we eat, vegetables, cheese, meat, you name it, is locally produced because we decided some time ago to make the effort to eat as cleanly as possible, by clean, I mean, free from preservatives and things like that, artificial flavors, colorings, and all those sort of things our body neither needs nor wants. There are two really good things about living in the country. One, you can see exactly where your food comes from and two, because your buying form the actual producers, you're getting more or less, market prices. This can be typically to a third, or four, even half the price to what you would see the same type or produce in the Bio section of your supermarket or delicatessen in many cases.
So in answer to Itsoversugar, it's been a while too since I actually ordered naturally raised products by mail order. Some months in fact, I’m now thinking about it, it's even longer than that. Many of my circles who continue to live the urban lifestyle and they keep me upraised about what's going on in various parts of the world. One supplier, I'd like to draw your attention to, and I have no connection to them, by the way, I just think they are a brilliant, brilliant operation, is Polyface Farms. They are based in Virginia, but I think they serve Virginia and Maryland but one of the great things about Polyface Farms and many others who follow a very similar pattern is that take on apprentices. Once the apprentice is qualified, they then go off and start farms of their own so you've got them in Ohio, Iowa, Oregon, Pasadena, quite a few places around that part of the States. The thing is they're not alone. It really is a simple matter of going onto Google and putting in the search term, firstly, "farmer's market" and the your local area or "grass fed beef" then your local area, county, state or whatever and you'll find a whole hosts of different producers producing exactly the type of food that we as low carbers want to eat. If you got the opportunity to go to one that is near to you, you'll often find that the price that you pay on the farm is a lot less than your paying mail order. The thing to do then is to get together with other people who would like to eat the way you do and buy, say, half a cow, or half a sheep, or that sort of quantity and divide it up. Another good thing about doing in that way is that, if you buy half an animal, you get virtually everything that comes with that half of the animal. They are also buying it a lot earlier in the food supply chain so you can guarantee its freshness. And as just as mouseissue had said, you get the cuts that are often sold off to restaurants or specialist delicatessen. Where we are, they have a very, I'll say, a curious system, but it's not curious in many ways. It's quite sensible. Quite a number of these small farmers all over Europe, in fact, will at certain times of the year, allow you either on your own or as a group to buy, say, a calf and you pay for it there on and it becomes your calf. You are the registered owner of cow number, whatever its ear ticket says but you don't take it home with you. It stays on the farm and the farmer will continue to raise it for you. This is normally done through the grass feed season as well so you can be sure that most of its feed is on good, natural pasture. Once it has reached its table weight the farmer will also organize the preparation for table giving you excellent quality meat at a very reasonable price.
The main thing I'd like people to take away from this is that we don't have to accept just what the shops have to offer, that with a little bit of investigation, a little bit of tenacity, and not being shy to ask around, we can find some of the best food for our table and our families that is possible to find.
Hope that helps,
Mark
