Despite the one-word title, the subject was much more specifically aimed at sustainability topics; we talked about sustainable agriculture, the environmental cost of eating locally versus eating food shipped in from around the world, organics versus commercially raised produce, seed saver organizations, the Farm Bill, laws regarding food labeling, gleaning programs, food banks’ handling of and need for more fresh produce, canning and putting food away, root cellars, gardening, and taking care of our food supply as a community “in these tough economic times”.

There were five guest panelists:

• A woman who worked for the public health department, and whose husband is a chef about to open a new restaurant here in town (WOO HOO!). I regret not writing down her name.
• Boots, a friend of my mother-in-law’s, who runs a local ranch that sells humanely raised chickens, cows, and pigs, as well as hosting two guest cabins where people can stay with their families (and even their horses!).
• Dean, who runs The Fourth Element, helping other businesses “go green”.
• Rolf, who owns our much-beloved local bookstore Jerrols, on the panel because he and his family are trying to eat locally and grow most of their own produce, and he reports much of his experience in his blog.
• Gregg, a local farmer who raises seed crops through his business Irish Eyes Garden Seeds.

The panelists sat in chairs at the front of the room, facing the group, and our host asked them all three questions:

1. What is good food?
2. What do you see as a big problem facing our access to good food?
3. What do you think we can do to keep good food in our community?

The structure was pretty loose, and he introduced people and then asked them to answer the questions, which meant that the answers were often lost in their own biographies. Some were more specific than others, but everyone seemed to share a few basic ideas:

• Good food was unprocessed, nutritious, and nurturing.
• Threatening our access to good food was agribusiness, the difficulties faced by small farmers, misguided government regulations, and the steadily climbing cost of distribution – which will hopefully have the effect of turning a lot of people into small-scale urban gardeners.
• Keeping good food in our community could be accomplished by networking meetings where growers could meet buyers, encouraging people to keep shopping at the Farmer’s Market, and general public education on gardening and putting food away.

My interest in the event, besides spending some nice time with Julie, was mostly in meeting people who I hoped would have a more liberal bent than I’m used to encountering in our small town (a joke about “that one” met with loud laughter and proved I was among kindred spirits), and seeing what they had to say about a topic as diverse as “Food”. Part of me was curious to see if veganism would come up, but it seemed clear after a few minutes that something that specific was unlikely to get discussed.

Or so I thought – we did a have a brief couple of minutes when Boots talked about life on her ranch, and movingly described her devotion to the animals she raised for food. She makes sure they live the most natural lives possible, the cattle are all grass fed and spend their days roaming the pasture, the chickens get to wander around, the pigs wallow in the dirt.

“They live a happy life with one bad day,” she joked, and everyone laughed.

The business is totally open, anyone is welcome to go up and see how she raises the animals, and she even described a workshop where she taught thirty people how to kill and prep chickens. “A lot of heads were rolling that day!”

I was sincerely touched by her obvious devotion to caring responsibly for the animals (hopefully this doesn’t sound disingenuous appearing right after the head-rolling comment). When asked whether any vegetarians ever visit the ranch, she said that many had, and a lot of them bought meat from her after seeing how naturally the animals got to lead their lives. I know that for a lot of people who might otherwise become vegetarians, eating humanely-raised meat is enough. My question was, would it be enough for me?

In the past, our family has jumped at the chance to get local meat from farms we trust, and for years we’ve made the choice to spend a little extra for the eggs from cage-free hens (although I’ve since learned that “cage-free” isn’t always more humane). This year we were able to get most of our eggs from a local farm, whose owner I met and did business with personally, and her obvious love for her chickens (or “the girls” as she called them) was, and I try not to use this word too often because it makes me feel a twelve-year-old from the 50′s: delightful.

When your current diet feels unsettling, when your heart and politics collide with your palate, you look around at other people who have made choices in this situation, and you notice a continuum. There’s the general continuum, of people who eat meat, to people who eat humanely-raised meat, to people who just eat certain types of meat, to people who eat no meat, to people who are vegan and eat no meat or dairy and generally shy away from animal products of any kind.

Then you have the “vegan continuum”, where you’ll find people with surprisingly different perspectives on how we should, as human beings, think of our fellow earthlings, the animals. Some people don’t like factory farms, but still think it’s okay to use animals for food, whereas at the other end you’ll find folks who not only eschew factory farms, but any animal-derived product, from shoes to furniture to cosmetics and vaccines.

You start to ask yourself, where do I fit in? And why don’t carrots taste good? Okay, that last one is probably just me.

Since this is my blog, presumably everyone wants to know what I think, what I’ve decided, what my politics are. Drumroll please……..

I don’t know.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just make a decision, order the t-shirt, and be done with it? I think so. But I have a lot of questions, and a lot of feelings. I don’t think it’s okay to tell everyone in the world they shouldn’t use animals for food. It’s impractical. I think people like Boots should be praised; look at the example she’s setting! What if everyone made the switch from factory-farmed meat to locally-grown humanely-raised meat? What if the humane treatment of animals because something the majority of people cared about, and were willing to use their dollars to support? Do people have to become vegans to be humane?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Despite my years of vegan groupie status, I’m still muddled on many issues, in part because I find it so hard to become a vegan outright. If I were one of those people who loved vegetables, I think it would be easy to make the transition and never look back, even stand there and wonder why others didn’t – just like it was easy for me to say that every mother should try to have an out-of-hospital birth until I did it myself, and my son almost died.

But it’s not that easy, and while some people are able to turn their principles into hard stakes they can drill into the ground and anchor their new behaviors to; others (like myself), find that instead of feeling anchored, they just end up falling back into old habits while using their iron principles to beat themselves up.

I’d like to treat myself more humanely, as well as the animals.

Which means exactly what I’m doing. Small, but important steps. Lots of thinking. Lots of reading. Lots of talking. Lots of writing. And a commitment to following the journey through.

Most people have an idea of what good nutrition is, and we get that from doing our own research. I’ve been a nutrition-information-groupie for years and years (despite my unhealthy eating habits – in spite of?), and the conclusions I’ve come to, from looking at the evidence, is that a diet low in animal products (or void of, depending on the person) and high in vegetables and complex carbs offers the best protection against heart and other disease, and is the healthiest approach to eating for the vast majority of people.

After nutrition (some would say long before) comes the animal welfare issue. I’ve done a lot of research into that as well, and in my personal opinion, whether one believes that animals should be used as food or not, the modern factory farm is rife with cruelty. It isn’t something I want to support. Eventually I hope not to anymore. Right now I support it as little as possible.

I have strong feelings about this myself, but I don’t demand that everyone eat the way I do, or the way I’d like to. No matter what, people need to find their own way to do what’s best for them.