My Organic Journey - Bringing Home the Bacon

Saturday was thrilling. We drove out to Fenwood Farm and I think I smiled from ear to ear the whole time; It's rare that I get my husband out of his office due to school. Between that and bringing my son to a real farm for the first time was spectacular. We arrive to see a few couples leaving and pulled up outside a fenced area with 6 emus. One we thought was doing his morning prayer ritual only to see him get up and see two doing a kind of ritual. My son's first romantic encounter. The driveway was lined with trees and had to be 2 miles long. It was quite romantic. They also have large fields on either side for corn. We pulled up to a house where on the side was the store. inside was small but they had maybe 5 deep freezers and a sliding wall fridge with all kinds of different meats and cuts. To my surprise with every purchase they give you a bag of organic chicken bones for free. Saves at least 10 bucks and homemade chicken stock is the best. So far, I've made turkey sandwiches for anyone who wants and broccoli leek soup out of the homemade stock. At present I have the bones of a 20 pound turkey stewing for turkey stock. None of which I contemplate my demise while enjoying every bite. My goal is to make a few dishes. One I plan is a buckwheat pasta turkey salad and of course some homemade turkey soup. As the title says, I also bought organic bacon and breakfast sausage which I'll use when the urge takes me there. I'm sure it will be in the company of my wonderful family and probably some friends. I look forward to telling you more about my organic journey.

Fenwood Farms - My organic Journey

I got an email yesterday from Carol Fennema about my order for a humanely raised turkey.It's going to be ready for pick-up next weekend. I plan to roast it and use it for a number of dinners and lunches and maybe a midnight sandwich or two. I will also make an incredible stock with it that I can use for a variety of dishes and soups. I also got organic bacon. I've had organic bacon twice before and there is nothing like it. So here is how my quest for sustainable meat for consumption started. Well... I'll tell you why I went looking recently. I was going to order a Turkey for Christmas from Beretta Farms. I never got around to it and one of the reasons is because its all the way in King City which seems like quite a drive. It was also our first celebratory Christmas dinner and I decided on duck instead, which I already had in the freezer. In the new year I started looking for a local, organic meat CSA to subscribe to but I didn't find one that suited my budget and desire. I wanted not just beef but whole organic chicken or Turkey, organic bacon and beef in a combination box. I found wholeearth.com and stoddart.ca as well as looking through all the farms listed on the eatwild.com website which I found on Michael Pollan's website under the resource section. I finally came across Fenwood Farm and I can't, for the life of me, find the website that gave me a link to their farm but I'm sure glad to have placed an order via an online submission form. What pushed me over the edge to buy this turkey was that the price was not that much higher than a regular turkey you buy in the store. In fact,I bought a smaller utility turkey from a generic grocery store a few weeks ago. Cooked to perfection but every time I ate it I had this conversation in my head. Is this bird going to kill me? how was it processed? Did all the people involved in getting this to the store take as much care as needed to ensure I wouldn't get sick? When did he loose his wing? Why? Do I need to know? Instead of enjoying a perfectly cooked delicious turkey I was paranoid, I couldn't enjoy it to the fullest and maybe I was just lucky not to get sick. As Marion Nelson writes in her book "What to Eat" 370,000 people in the US every year get sick because of something preventable in the food chain. 5000 people die every year because of the industrialization of food. I had to get closer to my food source so I'm going to the farm to personally shake the hand of the person who has cared for my bird and then I'm going to enjoy it in probably close to 20 different meals. I'm going to walk on the grass that my turkey walked on and I'm going to be fed by the people who fed my bird. I'm pretty excited to embark on my organic journey. I feel like its an adventure and in some way I am becoming directly linked to my food. I am becoming an active participant in the food chain instead of a bystander. I am slowly coming out of the coma of food commodity. I'll let you know how it goes.