Eyes Wide Shut

With the committment I've made to try and live and eat more sustainably, sometimes I am overwhelmed by the amount of information I find. The more I learn, I'm like my 5 year old watching a scary movie with her hands clapped over her eyes -- but her fingers are parted just a little bit to peek.

I feel like Jerry Maguire, when he began his mission statement. There is no turning back, despite the fact that it means his career will be in ruins.



There is no turning back for me, even though I wish so badly that I could hit the rewind button in my brain and go back to a moment when I didn't care a whole lot about what I ate. Ask my husband -- he'll tell you that he's impressed with my dedication, very pleased with the wonderful dinners I've been cooking night after night; but in many ways I do feel like my nice, easy domestic role has been ruined.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't read the November issue of Natural Health magazine, regarding Sustainable Meat Eating. Or the October issue of National Geographic about the international economics and sustainability of fishing and fish-consumption.

Via simple Google searches, that anyone can do if they have the curiosity and the desire to learn,  I understand the influence of marketing on the healthier eating movement, and that terms like cage-free, natural, and organic are not necessarily self-explanatory, and that words like fully-pastured, local, and small are far more important.

I also heard the term beak-trimming.

Friends with good intentions are encouraging me to watch Food, Inc or read The Omnivore's Dilemma.

But I'm afraid my brain will explode.

Who cares why the chicken crossed the road??

It's more important that I know where that road is and what the chicken ate before crossing it.

About a year ago, Jamie Oliver convinced me to stop giving my children chicken nuggets. Initially, because it's just so damn convenient, I resisted it: "But I only buy the white breast meat kind!" But I gave it up, much to my middle daughter's chagrin, and have been making chicken nuggets on my own, with even the breading being my own concoction of old bread, crackers, cornmeal, arrowroot and various spices. (Middle daughter refuses to eat them, but that is for another post.)

So...
...encouraged by my numerous friends who belong to CSA's, but discouraged by the cost,
...inspired by my friend Laura who is running a beef and egg CSA on her family farm ,
...and bolstered by the November article in Natural Health Magazine on sustainable meat-eating,

I decided to buy Nature's Promise chicken breasts at Stop and Shop last week. Organic and free-range, I was willing to go over my stringent weekly grocery budget for the purchase, although there was no indication of where the chicken was raised, slaughtered and trucked in from, and I don't recall from the packaging what it ate before it gave up its life for my saute pan. So not a perfect purchase, but I figured better than what I'd been purchasing before, and less expensive than going to Whole Foods, where the chicken's entire curriculum vitae is listed on its price tag.

Ready to cook! I open the ziplock bag the chicken is packaged in - handy, since I probably won't make the entire package, and the plastic seems durable enough to go in the freezer. (I hate zip lock bags, by the way, and use them sparingly, washing them and rewashing them for repeated uses.) And what is inside? A total over-packaging, plastic nightmare! Six of those organic chicken breasts are individually wrapped in plastic. And the plastic is not reusable on two counts: 1) vacuum sealed, so it has formed to the meat and must be cut open, and 2) because it is used for meat (bacteria and such).

So -- healthy, homemade, minimally processed chicken dinner for the kids, but wasteful packaging with meat of unknown origins. If there were a game score between UrbanEcoMama and Earth, I'd say it's a tie.

Not good enough. UrbanEcoMama wants a win-win.