Cows in Lancaster County
I’m hungry. All. The. Time.
Well-meaning friends will say “Great! Eat! You can have anything you want.” But we live in the age of super-information with its blessings and curses and I know too much to just eat anything I want.
I know my mother didn’t worry about half the stuff I worry about today. But, for the most part, she ate vegetables from local farms and gardens, meats from cows/sheep/goats that ate grass and she was never really into sweets (such is the beauty of being born in the “developing” country).
New Stanton Farmers Market
I, on the other hand, am on the lookout for produce sprayed with pesticides, animal cruelty, and sugar content of just about any processed food out there. And I don’t even want to address fish and its mercurial blessings.
Raw milk cheese stand
It’s easy for me to get discouraged in this pursuit of real, clean food; from it being hard to find (on, say, interstates) to possible social consequences (if you enjoy perfunctory teasing for being a vegetarian, you’ll love going 100 % organic. I just can’t wait to start breastfeeding…). But, I stand on the shoulders of giants, people who fought and are still fighting with corporations, the government, and cancer so that the rest of us can be picky eaters. So what’s a little ridicule compared to those real battles? So what if I appear as either a snob or a cracked up, over-protective female mammal? I’m safely tucked in the folds of others who know better. And I get positively giddy when driving through Pennsylvania where I am now, I see cows grazing and find random farmers selling their goods. Chris and I will on the lookout for dairy farms selling raw milk, something I thought impossible in this freedom loving United States. Did I say I was giddy?