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Community Journal/ food choices (fwd)

Errors-To: owner-chrm-general@igc.apc.org

Kate - Your concern over eating food raised in ways you don't support 
is an increasingly visible choice many of us can make.  The knowledge 
that there ARE choices is at the root of the many green labelling 
activities. It seems to me that where we obtain our food is ultimately 
an individual choice.  Some of us have more options than others, and 
many people are working to make the options available more widely.  I 
raise my own poultry and lamb.  I buy/trade for beef and pork from 
local farmers whom I know and trust.

Others are doing the same. St. Louis-based direct marketing farmer 
David Schafer tells of a vegetarian customer who drove from the east 
coast to purchase poultry and beef from him.  She joined PETA, the 
animal rights organization, and forsook meat to protest conventional 
livestock handling/processing.  But she buys his products because she 
can see that he raises and handles animals in a manner she likes.  

Mary Fund expressed this sentiment well for me in the Feb '98 Kansas 
Rural Center 'Rural Papers', when she commented on the industrial hog 
wars in KS: "Frankly all this hog debate makes it very hard for me to 
eat pork.  For my part, the next pork I eat will come from a local 
farmer -- someone I trust, someone I want to support." 

  --  Wyatt Fraas

On 31 Jul 98, Kate A. Smith wrote:

From:          "Kate A. Smith" <katesmith@snip.net>
To:            <iffs@nal.usda.gov>
Subject:       Community Journal

Dear Journal:
...
And finally.  Last week I had the "opportunity" to tour a very large
"egg production facility."  I saw chicken hell.  The conditions in what
I was told was one of the better facilities around were truly like 
walking into hell.

This has thrown me into a personal quandary.  How can I eat eggs and
even worst, how can I eat chicken?  How did we ever let our food supply
be so out of our personal control?  Here comes that cliff...
 Kate Smith     RISA Steering Committee Moorestown, NJ






Wyatt Fraas, Martin Kleinschmit

Beginning Farmer Sustainable Agriculture Project
Center for Rural Affairs
PO Box 736
Hartington, NE USA 68739
402 254-6893  fax -6891
wyattf@cfra.org, martink@cfra.org
http://www.cfra.org