A small rant

So I went to the store I mentioned earlier to get eggs.  Oh yeah, I DID manage to get enough money to buy gas to go get milk and eggs like I wanted.

Anyway.  I went to the store and spoke to the woman who works there.  (we always chat a bit while I shop)  I told her excitedly about my cheese and yogurt this week.  Her face lit up and she said "OMG I LOVE YOU!!" I said "Well it was fun!" and she said " No, really, you have NO IDEA how many people don't want to bother!"  She went on to tell me about people asking her for butter.  It is currently not legal in our state for her to make butter from her raw milk.  She is only allowed to sell it from her farm as is, not even separating the cream from it.   These customers beg her to make butter for them (as if it's horribly complicated...heck I do it by accident!), and she needs to explain that she could be arrested and shut down and tries to tell them how easy it is to make butter.

But they don't want to bother.  It's too much trouble.

Making butter in a mixer, blender or food processor takes 5 minutes, another 3 to wash the buttermilk out, 1 more minute to wrap and stow in the fridge.  I make mine by putting the cream to run in my mixer until it separates, pour off the buttermilk, wash the butter in cold water, salt it and put it in a little glass dish in the fridge.  It's not rocket science!

Making Yogurt and Cheese is also not hard.  The hardest part is getting the milk up to the right temperature.  After that comes the waiting...waiting an hour for the bacteria to do it's work turning your milk into yummy goodness, another hour for the whey to drain, etc.   Again, not rocket science.  Scientists estimate the first cheese was made purely by accident when someone tried carrying milk in a camel's stomach (where rennet naturally occurs) and ended up with cheese.

But difficulty aside, I think food is a matter of frame of mind and commitment.  How important is your health?  How important is the health of your children?  Important enough to try a new food?  Learn a new skill?  Find a new way of cooking something?  To LEARN? 

These skills were nearly lost between the decades of WWII and perhaps 20 years ago.  Even today many people have no idea where their food comes from, as if the chicken is somehow grown in tidy little Styrofoam packages, boneless and skinless (and tasteless).  With the advent of modern technology, information is widely available!  Searching for cheese making methods, I came up with hundreds of pages explaining, in detail, how to make cheese of all kinds - from cream cheese to Parmesan to Mozzarella!  There are message boards and pages dedicated to answering questions of all of it and giving you step-by-step directions!

Curious about the method of slaughtering and processing chickens, I found many pages and several videos detailing the processes, the most humane methods of killing and cutting up chicken.  Guess what...it's not half as difficult and even less nauseating as you might think!  While I haven't yet killed a chicken for our use, I have learned to cut apart a whole chicken into fryer pieces in about 10 minutes or less.  It's. Not. Hard.  (apparently making whipped cream IS hard though since I can't seem to do that.  I end up with butter every time!)

We've grown soft and weak and stupid.  We have been raised not to think about what we eat, just to go into the grocery store and buy what looks good and on sale.  The result is a sharp rise in obesity, cancer and heart disease like nothing else in the country's history.  What's worse is our stupidity is now spreading to other parts of the world.  As other countries adopt our mindset - they get an equally sharp rise in obesity, cancer and heart disease!  Even our CHILDREN are developing heart disease as TEENAGERS! 

And people say they don't want to bother?  It's too much effort?

I know there are others out there like me who believe it is time we all went back to how things used to be, to raise our food naturally and humanely, for us to be in contact with what we eat long before it reaches our mouths.  It's time we went back to eating FOOD, not safe-synthetic-food-like-substances, eating the way God created our bodies to eat!