Just Eat: Local Eggs

Even though I grew up in a city, I have always been drawn to the country lifestyle.  Since I graduated from high school, I have lived the majority of my adult life in towns with less than 12,000 people.  In 2011 we finally bought a house on our little island, and although it is in a neighborhood, our community shares three and a half acres with a neighboring co-housing community that can be used for gardening and keeping animals.  This allows us to keep chickens, but share in the responsibility with four other families.  Although I anticipated enjoying sharing the experience with my children, I underestimated the personal satisfaction I would feel in raising and caring for these creatures.  There is a certain bliss after I have cleaned out the hen house, maybe moved the fence to a fresh grassy spot, and tossed around some extra scraps for everyone to enjoy.  I totally did not expect to feel like that about some birds.  

Also, and Martha Stewart has been saying this for years, fresh eggs taste really great.  You can seriously see the difference as soon as you crack them.  The yolk is twenty times more yellow than commercially raised eggs, as is the intensity of the flavor.  It has given me great pleasure to pass on some extra eggs each week to one of our elderly neighbors who always raised chickens herself, but now is not physically able to.  She had just stopped eating eggs altogether because store bought eggs tasted so bland and rubbery to her after decades of eating fresh.

I know not everyone is in a spot to keep their own chickens, but you might be able to find someone nearby who can. The website Local Harvest is a good place to start.  Most cities in our area actually allow people to keep three or four birds in their backyards.  I used to buy eggs from a local/cage-free/organic egg business.  And while I know the situation of those birds is better than being literally chained to a perch with their beaks removed while they are fed intravenously (the situation for the majority of factory farmed chickens), the above picture is still a little disconcerting to me.  It is actually from an article praising the aforementioned local egg business for their practices.  But after spending the last year around chickens, I know this situation is not ideal.  My goal this year is to move more towards consuming animal products either from animals that I have raised or that I actually know and trust the person who raised them.  It is a lofty goal, and I know we won't always be able to do it, but any purchases we do make this way will feel pretty good.

Just Eat: Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream

In 2010 Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream announced they were working towards using only Fair Trade Certified ingredients in their products by 2013. Longtime supporters of local farms and non-BGH dairy products, the founders always felt uneasy about the origins of their more exotic ingredients of vanilla, coffee, and cocoa, three industries which frequently use forced, and even child labor.  In a press announcement Jerry Greenfield said, "Fair trade is about making sure people get their fair share of the pie. The whole concept of fair trade goes to the heart of our values and the sense of right and wrong.  Nobody wants to buy something that was made by exploiting someone else."

Although Ben & Jerry's is definitely priced as a premium ice cream, our family accepts that we are paying for fair wages for their US employees, as well as, those abroad.  Also, it makes having ice cream a special treat, as opposed to a standard nightly dessert, which is definitely instilling healthy habits and attitudes in our kids.

Forced labor and especially child labor are really tough topics, and most of us want to believe it isn't that much of a problem anymore, but the reality is in 2012 over 21 million people worldwide are being exploited in forced labor situations and a quarter of those people are children (according to the United Nations' International Labour Organization's latest study).  But limiting our consumption of products that typically use forced labor and choosing fair trade when we do buy them is one step towards a solution.