Lately, Alister and I have been watching a lot of documentaries (partly because PBS and the history channel seem to be the only stations that don't foreign IP addresses).
Our latest find was Food, Inc. We had heard about the movie this summer, and after watching King Corn, and Super Size Me - we had it on our list.
It was excellent. The main thing that keeps going over and over in my head is this one scene where an organic farmer is outside butchering and packing chickens. He says that the big chicken factory tried to shut him down by saying his operations were unsanitary (well, we might think - he is outside!) So he had his chicken tested along with one of the supermarket packing plant chickens. His chicken was 1000 times cleaner!!!!!! than the packing pack chicken - and, he made the point, his chicken hasn't been through any chlorine baths.
While this makes me feel tremendously safer about shopping in our outdoor market - it also makes me thankful not to be in the US buying my food. Based on numerous articles I've been reading this past year - I've already told Alister that we can't eat ground beef when we visit the states unless it comes from my Uncle's farm - and now i'm afraid that I really will cave and go "organic" despite the cost. While food is generally more expensive here in Europe - and even while Ukrainian food doesn't have the best reputation in Europe - many things - such as Genetically Modified foods - have been banned. Here in Ukraine, there still are concerns about chickens who have been pumped up with steroids or whatever - people will tell you to buy beef or pork or buy from a babushka - but in general - I don't think there are the huge mega packing houses and meat plants that there are in the states. While a smaller scale may be seen as inefficient - right now i'm thinking "cleaner" and “safer”.
In the UK - Beef and other products are safer still - because of the Mad Cow scare - meat packages in the supermarket must be labelled with the farm from which the animal came - that means no mixed portions of cows from Uruguay, Texas and Timbuktu - You can even select a piece of meat that came from your neighbour down the road.
And that, I think, is pretty darn cool.
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1 comment:
We spent nine weeks in Ukraine adopting four beautiful girls. While in Ivanciv where the girls were, we ate little meat. We spent the last two weeks in Kyiv and I noticed the chicken had a much better taste than what I remembered in USA. I thought it was just not having it for a while until we got home and tryed some chicken , what a difference. I found that the chicken farms here turn out a full grown chicken in less than 75 days. Normally it takes six to seven months for a chicken to mature.
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