Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. — Michael Pollan
Real food makes me feel better. The last week I’ve been surviving on fast food and other crap due to a variety of financial and travel reasons and I feel horrible. One of the things I’ve realized this week is that it is hard to eat well when you have a limited budget. A $2 hamburger fills you up even if does do horrible things to your stomach, while actually buying stuff for a salad costs a lot more. This past week has made me realize I have to find a way to get involved in making sure everyone has access to good healthy food.
Okay, now that I got that out of my system 🙂. When we moved to Cleveland we discovered the West Side Market. It’s an old fashioned market full of various vendors selling meats, cheeses, and amazing produce. Most weeks we try to go at least once to buy healthy food.
And when I really focus on what I’m eating and how fresh it is, I feel better. We’ve also been buying organic meat and it is amazing how little meat truly fills you up when it is not full of steroids and other nasty stuff. I was in New Mexico earlier this year and had an experience that truly opened my eyes to the difference between good meat and bad meat.
I drove from El Paso to Las Cruces, NM a few times. The first couple of times I drove at night and as I drove through Mesquite, I smelled this horrible smell. It smelled like death. I had new clue what it was, but I knew I wanted to get out of that town as soon as possible. The third time I drove through Mesquite was during the day and I found out that the smell was emanating from a factory farm. Hundreds of cows were in tiny pens walking through there own filth. It turned my stomach and I realized that I really needed to be more careful with the meat I put in my stomach.
Later that day, I was driving on the back roads and I came across a Texas Longhorn wandering pretty much free. He stopped and gave me this really insolent look and I realized then and there that if I did eat meat, I wanted it to be the free range kind. Below is a picture of this long horn steer.
Cairn by Cairn 