We’re omnivores. I know that many people interested in food ethics and sustainability choose to be vegetarians or vegans; but we made the conscious decision to continue eating dairy, meat and fish. Developing and keeping habits that support our Responsible Meat ethic is the most difficult part of living the way we do, and probably required the most research to get started. Since we moved to the Pacific Northwest, though, this has become a whole lot easier.
Here is the big secret to why we can go six to eight weeks between shopping trips: we get our milk and butter delivered. We buy organic milk from Smith Brothers Farms, located 20 miles away in Kent, WA. Not only is their milk delivered every week, but we don’t pay for delivery! Because their milk is only available by delivery (you can’t get it at a store), we only pay for the milk itself ($3.99 for a half-gallon; comparable or a little less than organic cartons at the store). And we don’t have to drive to the store every week to buy it. That’s a pretty good deal, if you ask me.
We’re very lucky to have milk delivery available here, and I know it’s not something that exists everywhere. It seems, though, to be making a comeback around the country; a quick Google search turned up milk delivery options in 30 states, and many of them are listed here.
The demand for local, organic, family farm-raised meat seems to be increasing as well. Many farmers markets (including the St. Paul market we patronized when we lived in Minnesota) have meat stalls, and plenty of independent farms have shops on the premises.
We buy our meat from The Meat Shop of Tacoma, a certified organic farm just a few miles south of town. The Meat Shop is the oldest USDA Certified Organic meat shop in the country, and has been run by the Markholt family since it opened in 1963.
So as to minimize our trips to the farm, we buy meat every three to four months, and store it in the freezer. This is our most recent haul—yes, that’s a lot of meat on that table, but that’s four months’ worth. We eat on average about 1.5 pounds of meat per person, per week (that’s the pre-cooked weight, including bones, skin, and other inedible stuff; it’s about a pound a week of edible, cooked meat).
When we did the math that seemed like an awful lot, so I tried to compare that to the average American’s meat intake. I tell you what, it sure was hard to find that data—at least from a reliable source. I finally unearthed a spreadsheet from the USDA Economic Research Service website, and it listed the average per-capita consumption of retail (that is, the meat right out of the store—before cooking, boning, skinning, etc.—that’s comparable to what we buy) beef, veal, pork, lamb and chicken in the United States was 198.3 pounds in 2008. That’s 3.8 pounds of meat per person, per week, or just over half a pound a day. It took me several minutes and 5 recalculations to believe that number could possibly be true.
Now I’ll admit: organic happy meat is more expensive than the conventional stuff—sometimes considerably more. But between eating less than the half the amount of meat of the average American, saving the pricier cuts for very rare occasions, and our other shopping habits, our total annual grocery spending comes out just about even. And besides, we like being able to shop directly from the farmer, rather than having half of that money go to the grocery stores in the middle of the chain.
Anyway, nevermind the ethical/environmental/health reasons—the Meat Shop’s nitrate-free ham is hands-down the best dang hunk of meat I have ever tasted. I’m salivating now, just thinking about it.
Seafood, on the other hand, is a whole different conundrum. I grew up around fish—I even have fishermen and fishmongers in my New England family—so seafood is a must-have for me. Since we live so close to sea water we don’t so much have to worry about the price of fish (it’s cheap!), but the sustainability of seafood is an issue that confronts us daily.
It’s not enough that we shop at a local fish market (that’s Northern Fish above; this is their 98th year that they’ve been owned by the same family, and they’re located just blocks from our house. It doesn’t get any more local than that)—our main concern is avoiding species that are overfished, illegally caught, or unsustainably farmed. The Monterey Bay Aquarium has an excellent consumer guide called Seafood Watch, which analyzes nearly every edible fish species and gives recommendations on which to buy and which to avoid. This unfortunately precludes some of my old preferences (including Unagi, the broiled eel dish I always ordered at Japanese restaurants), but learning more about the alternatives to overfishing have led me to discover new loves.
My new favorite, and a purchase we make regularly: Dungeness crab. It’s local, it’s been well-managed for over fifty years, and it’s one of the tastiest delights I can think of (even better than my beloved New England lobsta, in my humble opinion).
Finally, eggs. To be honest, eggs have always been low priority for us. We always bought cage-free, vegetarian-fed, organic eggs at the co-op (as opposed to ones labeled “free-range”—a vague legal term that only means that a door needs to be open somewhere near the chickens, which are far too stupid to figure out how to use it), but it wasn’t until we moved here and found out how chicken-friendly our region is that we considered other options. Now we buy our eggs from a friend who keeps chickens right in his residential Tacoma neighborhood—these girls are served vegetarian feed, and feast on bugs as they wander around his back yard. They’re happy, and since the eggs are so beautiful and tasty, we’re happy, too.
Whew. That’s it. You’ve seen pretty much everything that’s in our cupboard, root cellar, attic, refrigerator and freezer. These posts may only have served to demonstrate just how weird we are, for all I know, but my intention was merely to show that eating sustainably doesn’t have to be expensive, or insanely difficult.
And judging by everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve talked to, maybe it won’t be too long before it isn’t weird at all.
It’s tough sometimes to explain to people that there’s a difference between being weird and living mindfully!
Fishmonger? Hey, I resemble that remark! Actually, out here it’s getting harder to get a good piece of fish at all, whether sustainably or otherwise. In a continuing effort to rebuild ground fish stocks, our fishermen are allowed by Congress fewer and fewer days at sea. Now there are both fewer fish and fewer fishermen–it was always a hard living, anyway. Now people are underwater in their boat assets, and can’t go fishing enough to pay the loans. The Portland Fish Exchange is hurting, in part because the lobster lobby won’t let the draggers land their by-catch of big, honking lobsters that get caught in the nets. Maine law continues to require them to be left in the ocean, but Mass says it’s okay to sell them in Gloucester. (You’ll find monster lobsters in New Hampshire, too, direct from the Isles of Shoals.) Guess where the fishing boats go, more and more.
Indeed, it’s your lobsta that’s become a robust, healthy, sustainable fishery. For one thing, like your crabs, dem bugs eat dead things, a place for everything, and everything in its place. For another, dem bugs flock to dead things in traps like ants to a sugar cube. It’s only the ones not smart enough to leave the trap that get harvested at the surface, and the little ones thrown back are measured with calipers. But, I think it’s also a human factor that keeps lobstering sustainable: the territoriality is ancient and tribal. Every corner of water is marked, and one can get shot out there. Maritime law enforcement is stretched so thin, they spend a lot of their time just helping everyone get along.
Fishmonger! Your word, Dad! Ha. And yes, bottom-feeders are tasty—which is probably why people like catfish so much.
Great comment. We’ve got some issues about fishing rights here, too—especially for shellfish like the famed geoduck. Tribal land, the DNR, private interests, and hobby diggers are all butting heads about that one. I try to stay out of it by avoiding geoduck altogether (though it is tasty, I must say). But I know these issues are everywhere—I’d turn to farmed seafood but aquaculture is a whole ‘nuther kettle of…uh…fish.
I figure that as consumers we’re voting with our dollar; hopefully with enough awareness to go around the demand might eventually shift enough to change the supply to something more sustainable. Oregon is working on bar codes to go with every fish for sale there, so the customer can track where it came from:
http://bit.ly/knMGy
I’m interested to see how it goes; I’d love to see something like that here.
That’s right, you live in Geoduck Central. I had never heard of geoduck, until you shared Nicole’s appellation for it with me. Maybe we can try it? Wonder how you cook it.
Yer Mum and I stopped eating farmed salmon, after I learned the filets we were selling came from Chile. They would arrive in 20-pound, styro boxes, packed in dry ice, via overnight delivery, twice a week. Chile today, gone tomorrow. Sold where salmon run wild. Or used to, anyway.
Your points are well taken about how far foodstuffs have to fly, nowadays, and all the refrigeration required to sustain shelf life. Seafood is an egregious example of it. Seafood has become a global industry, and the modern technological wonders have put it out of people’s minds that once upon a time, people went fishing for it. At our fish market on the water, folks would ask me where the fantail shrimp came from. Vietnam. No, no, some would reply, I don’t even want to think about what they swam in. But that’s more to the point about the ick-factor of fish pens.
Hi Chandler, these posts have been great. I have a strange question, but would you perhaps share your input on drinking water as well? My guess is that you and the tailor have done some research there as well and it’s something I am struggling with. Right now I order h20 from a spring in Arkansas in glass bottles, but the fossil fuels to get it to me and the fact that it’s not a local source is not good. Thanks always for sharing -
Thanks, Erika. Bottled water is somewhat of a touchy subject for us; we’re staunch supporters of tap water. This isn’t really the space to go into it in great detail, but basically I view bottled water as a huge scam, perpetuated by marketing that wants us to think our own tap water is unsafe to drink. Bottled water is not regulated by the EPA (as one might think); it’s regulated by the FDA, and, at least a few years ago, it was only managed by one person, for part of his or her time each day. So that’s not a lot of man-hours to devote to a gigantic industry. I have a lot more issues with that particular bit, but there’s the tip of the iceberg.
The real kicker is that if you look closely at the sources listed on many brands of bottled water (I dunno about your particular brand), they disclose that the water comes from a *municipal water supply* (as opposed to some mythical mountain stream). Municipal supply = tap water. So basically many of these companies are bottling the tap water that we already pay for with our taxes, and then selling it back to us for hundreds of times the amount we already paid.
So between that, the fossil fuels for transport that you mentioned, and the BPA-leaking plastic (which is made from fossil fuels) containers it comes in, bottled water really burns me. The EPA doesn’t regulate bottled water, but it sure as heck regulates tap water—so I’m putting my money on them.
To cut down on the chlorine in tap water, though, for now we have a Brita filter for our tap water. And it’s on the list to make our own charcoal filter (you can re-use the charcoal by putting it in the oven to re-activate it) so we don’t have to keep throwing the Brita ones away.
Sorry for the long-winded answer, but I hope that helps!
My non-MN friends think it’s really funny, but we buy our eggs from the Mom-and-Pop video rental store. They raise chickens in their backyard, where the chickens roam and eat the bugs. Best eggs ever!