Who Wants Chicken Nuggets with Legs?

Have you ever eaten a wild blackberry off the bush? Did you think of it as just a piece of food or was it something special? Something that the earth produced with just the right amount of water and sunlight? I bet you were poked by a thorn while reaching for it but kept going because it looked perfectly ripe and you were lucky to have gotten to it before the birds.

There’s something about picking those berries from the wild that makes it more than just food. That nature has worked perfectly for them to grow and allowed me to come along at the right time seems to be a small miracle. Of course, I could go buy blackberries grown in perfect conditions and shipped across the country, but they wouldn’t be the same. Not only because these small berries probably have twice the nutrition as the store bought, but because I know that this is how nature intended things to work. My wild berry didn’t need herbicide to control weeds, fertilizer to grow, and an antifungal so it wouldn’t rot. It worked just the way it was supposed to.

Now, do I think that it is reasonable to harvest all our food from the wild? No. But I want to acknowledge that things grown in partnership with nature are different. My point in bringing this up is the problem I have with treating animals like widgets in a factory, or more accurately, chicken nuggets with legs.

To acknowledge that our food was once alive (hopefully) is an important step in caring about the food that you put into your body. If we think of things as their end product: hamburger, chicken nugget, bacon, then we might as well be growing it all in a laboratory; I don’t think any of us want that. But if we do acknowledge that our food was alive, especially food we get from animals, then we must ask ourselves if the conditions in which they lived are okay for our food to have been exposed to.

Tens of thousands of chickens in a barn, thousands of hogs, or cattle in dirt lots all eating unlimited grain and standing in their own waste is a bleak picture. Is this what God wanted when he told us to have dominion over the animals? These animals live in such poor conditions that they need to be given feed medicated with antibiotics to keep from getting sick. A West Texas A&M study showed that 14% of native steers and19% of dairy-cross steers (male, castrated cattle) are lactating! No reason has been given for this, but I would look hard at the practice of hormonal implants used in feedlots. This is not what nature intended!

This is not, as you probably guessed, a commentary on why we should stop eating meat. Pasture based meat is one of the most nutrient dense, healthy foods you can consume. God created the animals and the earth to work wonderfully together for the benefit of us. I think he knew that if we worked within the guidelines that He created then our bodies and the earth would remain healthy.

Luckily there are more farms going back to this pasture-based system. For farmers, the benefits are reduced fertilizer and medication use, lower animal mortality, reduced feed costs, turning manure into an asset instead of a problem, improved animal welfare, and a healthier working environment due to reduced exposure to harmful chemicals.

The consumer that buys from these types of farms gets nutrient dense food, meat without antibiotics or steroids, connection with their food producer, a stronger local economy, and healthier local environment. Raising animals in the context of working with nature is not just an issue that deals with quality of life for the animal, it is about raising the quality of the farm, the community, the life of the farmer and the consumer.

How often do we lament nowadays that “they don’t make things like they use to!” Appliances break after a few years, clothes don’t last more than a season, cars can’t make it 100,000 miles without a computer chip failing. The same has happened to our food system. Yes, you can get oranges in January in Kentucky, but the quality of everything has eroded. Corporations that control our food supply are not interested in creating the most nutrient dense food possible. They want to create the most consistent product, the cheapest way possible. And maybe that’s fine for buying a pair of socks, but when it comes to the nourishment of our one and only body, I think we deserve better.

At one time you could go directly to a farmer for meat and dairy and you knew the quality was good because you could see for yourself how the animals were raised and could speak directly to the producer. That’s hard to do when you go to grocery and the beef came from Texas, the tomatoes from California and the bananas from Guatemala.

So, is it reasonable to only buy things that come from your local community? Maybe not. It would be pretty hard to find a locally sourced iPhone. But I think there are some things that are worth searching for, and maybe it’s the protein producer in me, but quality meat should be high on that list. And it may not be as easy as or cheap as going to the big box store, but I’ll put up with a few thorns if I know my food is produced in conjunction with nature and not in spite of it.