Retail Rant/Rave: Walmart Finds

I'm sure there are readers out there who are sick of me talking about how much I love my food co-op and the awesome, fresh, organic, minimally processed food that my family has been enjoying for the past two months. Those readers are very busy, have very tight budgets, and/or are not completely obsessed with food the way that I am.

Fair enough. I'm going to go ahead and admit that I DO still shop at...gasp...Walmart every other week or so because of the extremely limited retail selection in my area. But while there I try to stick to my guns regarding minimal processing, organically raised, and less packaging whenever possible. Surprisingly enough, the responsible eater CAN find products like this at Walmart, and for nearly the same price as the other stuff. Here are some of the products that I've found at my local Walmart (and please note that I'm not being compensated by anyone to talk about any of these products, just putting the info out there).

1. Hormel Natural Choice Deli meats

I've been buying nearly all of my meats through my food co-op, including fresh pork, sausages, ground beef, lamb chops, Texas longhorn burger, etc. Unfortunately, none of the meat producers offer nitrate-free deli meats. Now, the jury is still out on sodium nitrates, which I had never heard of until I was pregnant and told to avoid food that contained them. I did a little research and it turns out that prolonged exposure to nitrates caused lab animals to develop cancer with alarming frequency. Since my son LOVES his ham sandwiches, and since I LOVE my little boy, I'm going to buy nitrate-free meat whenever possible.

I was first attracted to the packaging of these Hormel meats because it was recycled cardboard and natural inks. I know, I know--great reason to buy roast turkey, right? In reading the label, I could see that they had in fact been minimally processed (yay!) and contained no nitrates or artificial preservatives AT ALL. Score! The Hormel website mentions that they are able to process the meat using a high pressure cold water something or other to keep it preserved without chemicals. Of course, it doesn't last very long in my house because we go through ham (and turkey and roast beef) sandwiches like they were going out of style and these meats taste good. And since Hormel is a big industry producer, their products are consistently stocked at Walmart for the same price as the pretend and chemically-injected meats.

2. Back to Nature Crackers

 Along with our sandwich obsession, my family also has a cracker fetish. Bill and I could have crackers, cheese, and wine for dinner on a regular basis and be happy as clams. I've been meaning to attempt to make my own crackers, but the beautiful weather and steady pace of real work has kept me from it. (I'm also saving up for a pasta roller, which will probably help in the cracker department).

In the meantime, I have been buying lots of tasty cheeses from the co-op but had no crackers to eat them with. A brief scan of the depressingly unhealthy (despite WHOLE GRAIN promises from the box) selections in the cracker aisle had me convinced that we would not be able to enjoy our favorite snack without the addition of trans fats, hydrogenated oils, or obscene amounts of sodium. Enter Back to Nature.

Again, I was drawn to the recycled cardboard box, and then fell in love with the ingredients label. Organic all around, no artificial ANYTHING, and super tasty-sounding flavors. I bought 3 boxes to try and I have to say that they were all gone in about a week.

3. Stoneyfield Yogurt

This is probably not a huge surprise to those who buy organic, but I wanted to put it out there because I constantly see people linger at the yogurt section trying to decide which to pick up. Yogurt is one of those tricky foods that few people eat because they looooove the taste of it--most people eat it because they know it is good for them. Unfortunately a lot of brand name yogurts contain huge amounts of sugar and crazy ingredients (no, fiber does not occur naturally in yogurt and any carton telling you that it does will make you fart all afternoon).

Stoneyfield products are all organic, which is an important characteristic to look for when buying food that comes from cows, considering how environmentally damaging the cattle industry is. Their products also don't contain huge amounts of added sugar, which is why I used to buy the Yo-Baby products (from Stoneyfield) for Joe. I say used to because for some reason our Walmarts stopped stocking them, and I started buying his yogurt locally through the co-op.

I also want to put it out there that if you haven't tried Greek-style yogurt, you should. It doesn't taste like olives or feta cheese, it is just a thicker, creamier texture with less fat. No fat, in fact, in many cases. It feels more sinful to eat, but it has more protein than regular yogurt, so you'll be fuller for longer.

That's it for now. I have also found organic, cage-free chicken and eggs for the same price as their shelf-mates in Walmart. Actually, Walmart actually has a generic brand of organic, cage-free eggs. I buy my chicken through the co-op now to do my part in reducing emissions and support local farmers, but it's nice to know that there are options. Actually, a friend of mine pointed out this article from The Atlantic discussing how it is getting hard to hate Walmart as they become more open to dealing locally and stocking their shelves with more responsible foods.

Wally-world still has a long way to go, but it's a start and an opportunity for us to vote with our dollars at the checkout, while doing something good for our families.    

Hooray for Local Food!

 

This beautiful bounty is my first order purchased from the Oklahoma Food Coop, which I've recently joined. It includes farm fresh eggs, grass-fed ground beef, grass-fed Italian pork sausages, bulk pork neck bones (awesome for saucemaking), super-healthy yogurt cheese, local organic honey, fresh organic radicchio, and a beautiful 25lb pail of local, organic whole wheat flour. I also ordered 36 strawberry, 26 tomato, and 20 pepper LIVE PLANTS, but those we won't pick up until March or April. 

As you may remember from my post about the movie "Food, Inc." I was pretty grossed out by the things I learned about the food industry in this country and started investigating other options for feeding my family. The Oklahoma Food Coop delivers in my area, and connects dozens of organic and certified naturally grown producers in our state, many of whom practice the humane techniques for growing livestock discussed in the movie. I already prefer to batch cook meals to save time, and so with a little extra planning, I could buy fresh, local, HEALTHY ingredients, spend a day cooking, and then be good to go for the month and know exactly what was in the food I fed to my family. 

This resolution also coincides with the March Challenge posted on Not Dabbling in Normal in which readers are being encouraged to try to avoid commercially processed foods for the entire month. For many of us, that will more likely mean cutting out as much as we can. I've already taken steps to make more basic staple foods from scratch, like our bread, and I'm planning to tackle pasta next month. With the meats pictured above, I plan to make a large batch of marinara sauce (from my grandmother's recipe) and meatballs. The sauce will be used for spaghetti, pizza, and lasagna that I'll be making next month. The wheat and honey will be used for our daily bread, which I make about twice a week. Once we start harvesting greens, dinner salads will be a big staple, too. I whipped this up last night:

 

Chicken salad with the local radicchio and hard-boiled eggs, and a homemade honey mustard vinaigrette. The chicken, while not locally raised, WAS humanely raised cage-free organically and I bought it at WALMART of all places, for the same price as the commercial stuff.  

Check out Local Harvest.org for sources of local foods in YOUR area, and give responsible eating a try. Supporting local business, eating more nutritious, better-tasting foods, being good to the environment...what's not to like?

Does Your Farmer's Market Take Food Stamps?

Last night Bill and I watched a film called Food, Inc. which I had never heard of until it landed on our counter. Generally speaking, it's one of your typical run-of-the-mill liberal documentaries in the same vein as Bowling for Columbine and Supersize Me. Now, I've already openly admitted my bleeding heart tendencies to you, so it's not a huge surprise that this film struck a major chord with me, especially given the very context in which I write most of the entries for this blog.

A striking statistic discussed in the film is that 1 out of every 5 health care dollars spent in this country today goes to treat diabetes, which is largely preventable. We've ALL seen this commercial:



Now, I've known for years that there is something ridiculously unnecessary about high fructose corn syrup nutritionally, but Food, Inc. explains the relationship between corn and industrial food production in this country and EVERYTHING ELSE. Public health, money, the environment, corporations, labor, immigration, regulatory agencies, and our legislation.



The wonderful thing about this problem is not necessarily political. We don't have to draw battle lines based on political parties or religious beliefs. Voting with your wallet in the checkout line for organic, local, and sustainable foods benefits your family, your neighbor's family, and your planet with no strings attached. It may cost a few extra dollars today, but by increasing the demand for these products in the marketplace, supply will go up and cost will go down. There is a point in the above trailer where a family is discussing having to choose between buying a few vegetables or a few hamburgers for the same price to feed their family. I'm immediately reminded of the trip I took to my local farmer's market this past summer where I asked a farmer what his price was for a head of garlic and he literally pressed an entire handful into my hands and told me to enjoy.

I like to think that he did that because he had an innate sense that I'd mention it here in this blog, which you are reading right now, to encourage YOU to think more about where your food comes from. That and farmer's markets are notorious for generous vendors and nutritionally superior products. It's an unfortunate reality that genetically engineered foods are not engineered to be made more nutritious, they're engineered to be cheaper. This applies to industrial breeding of cattle, pork, and poultry which has far-reaching impacts on our public health, environment, and global economy. I'm not arguing against eating meat. My family loves meat and animal products, but, as a farmer argues in the film, there is something to be said for respecting "the pigness of the pig."

At the end of the film there was a series of call-to-action suggestions which included one that I'd never thought about before: making sure your local farmer's market accepts food stamps. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it? Why not cut out the all of the middle men (Walmart, etc.) and connect two groups of people in the community that desperately need each other. I have no idea what would be involved legislatively to ensure that the vendors at my farmer's market are able to accept food stamps, but I am planning to ask the next time I'm there.

"A culture that just views a pig as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structures to be manipulated by whatever creative design a human can foist on that critter will probably view individuals within it's community and other cultures within the community of nations with the same type of disdain and disrespect and controlling-type mentality."
--Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms

As If My Opinion On Late Night Programing Mattered.

Blue Light Special

The Watkins family considers itself to be somewhat "crunchy," "tree-hugging," "green," and any other dirt-implying adjective used to describe people who believe in global warming and not littering.

Okay. Maybe we take it a step farther. Yes, we use cloth diapers, make our own baby food, grow our own vegetables, recycle, compost kitchen scraps, buy energy star appliances, drive a hybrid. And yes, at Christmas we use LED lights.
Here's where I'm going to be brutally honest and say that I can't stand our Christmas lights. I cringe when I see them. Truly. Not only do they harshly clash with our lovely incandescent faux candles in the windows, but they really seem to make the cold nights colder. I mean, come on! We don't put hundreds of lights on our house to save money, we do it for purely aesthetic reasons! What is the point of stringing up lights you can stand to look at? Oh wait...the alternative is to have no lights up for Christmas because you don't want to be a yuletide hypocrite and string up energy-guzzling traditional lights? Um, that's not an option for me. I am nothing if not unapologetically and ruthlessly festive.

When we bought our lights last year, no stores in town carried the then-hard-to-find "warm white" LED strings. So we shrugged and bought the "cool white." The only two houses in our neighborhood decked out in the icy, bluish hues were ours and the electrician down the street. And of course, after laying out a ton of not-so-cool cash on lights, we couldn't just yank them down and rethink our commitment to the cause. Sure, THIS year all of the stores are now stocking the warm whites. Buy more lights, you say? Well while that might be feasible at the incandescent price of $1.99 per 100 lights, it's not so much at $11.99 per 60 LED lights. Bill promises me that next year we can save up and splurge on the warm whites, but this year it's blues or nothing. Besides, he says, we're making a statement!

And he's right. This year it looks like more folks have jumped on the enviro-friendly--albeit blueish--bandwagon as there are now THREE houses in our neighborhood with cool white LEDs and several more with colored LEDs (including one for-real blue LED house). Was it our awkwardly clashing and kind of ghoulish display last year that convinced them? Probably not. But I'm sure that, like me, once they saw that they wouldn't be the only weirdos on the block with an eye on the electric bill, it was slightly more okay. So after much inner turmoil and mind-changing, I decided to throw up the blue-tinted white flag and stick with the statement-making LEDs. For one more year.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go hug my trees and make another batch of granola.

Fruit flies, don't bother me!

*I'm working on a few posts about recent activities around the ranch since we got home from our trip (including an absent Mutt Monday--sorry, gotta upload the photos), but in the meantime this is a post I started before we left.



This guy.
Who does he think he is? Why does he think it's cool to invite 30 or so of his best friends to come and keep me company in my kitchen? (FYI, the google images search for this guy is going to give me nightmares.)

The ugly truth about this whole organic/crunchy/homegrown/diy lifestyle that we're trying to lead is that much of what we do around the kitchen draws these little critters like...well...flies. We've got tons of kitchen scraps from making everything from scratch (eggshells, peels, veggie refuse, etc.) We use those scraps in our compost pile, which gets started in our cute little kitchen compost crock. We have a 9-month-old who sprinkles little bits of food ALL OVER THE PLACE when he eats. Seriously, I found a cheerio in one of my socks.

Basically our kitchen is the holy grail for fruit flies. This often leads to me keeping the windows shut tighter than Fort Knox, but every once in a while a beautiful afternoon breeze will tempt me into opening, ever so slightly, one of the kitchen windows.....then BAM. Dozens of fruit flies.

And guess what, folks? You can't smash them. Not only do they move at a hauntingly slow pace and in unpredictable floaty pattern, they are so darn small and light that they are normally gently pushed out of the way by the air current I make as I frantically try to crush them with whatever is handy. So what's the solution? Trapping them.
This was my first attempt at a trap, made from an old salad dressing jar, some chardonnay (I'm more of a pinot grigio girl), and dish detergent. The theory is that the bugs lean in to drink the wine and are poisoned by the soap. Or something. They mostly slip in and drown, which is fine by me.
The next method I tried was suggested by my friend, Lacey. Similar 3-ingredient set up, this time with a mason jar, apple cider vinegar, and a rolled up piece of paper. The idea is that the little idiots fly merrily down the cone and into the jar, and then freak out a bunch when they can't figure out how to get out. More drowning, more satisfaction on my part.
I found that a recycled page from one of my freelance jobs worked nicely. It was a 5th grade math workbook that I proofread. Combining my old hatred for fractions with my hatred for fruit flies? Sheer beauty.

As nice as these traps look on my counter, I'd really rather not need them at all. Does anyone out there have an end-all-be-all solution for these nasty house guests?

*Update: upon our return from Thanksgiving, it appears as if we had won the war. Lots of casualties, no live hostages. Yes!

A Family Affair: Cloth Diapers

I chose to post on this topic because as we travel for the holiday next week, we will be forced to use the evil disposable diapers (not because there aren't products out there made for traveling green, I just was too late to buy them before our trip), so I thought I'd put some good diaper karma out there. I also wanted to help dispel the misconceptions that cloth diapers are still the old piece-of-fabric-and-safety-pins models that weren't waterproof and were picked up by a cleaning service. Please. Do you think I'd do something if it wasn't easy, modern, and cute?

WARNING: This post involves a discussion of BABY POOP and how we get rid of it. To make up for it, I've dispersed adorable photos throughout to keep things fun.
Although our friends and family thought we were gluttons for punishment and too "crunchy" for our own good (and maybe even a bit gross), Bill and I decided to use cloth diapers on our son. We did this for the following reasons:

1. Over time, it is cheaper to buy 24 cloth diapers than thousands and thousands of disposable diapers.
2. It is more convenient to have diapers on hand at all times than drive into town (25-30 minutes) when we're low.
3. The obvious environmental savings of keeping chemical-laden diapers and poo out of landfills and our water supply.

The cloth diapers of today are cute, functional, easy to clean (no, our washing machine does not smell like poop), and hardly ever leak. We LOVE BumGenius One-Size* cloth diapers because they can be adjusted to fit throughout the entire diapering period.

*I'm not compensated by BumGenius, I just love the product. I pulled this picture from the CottonBabies website.

After we wash the diapers (I do a load every 2 days or so) we stuff them so they are ready to go at the changing table. Sometimes Joe "helps" like he did tonight:
Sometimes some of the diapers even make it back to the changing table.

We also use homemade cloth wipes. When Joe outgrew all of his tiny newborn receiving blankets, I cut them up into squares. I whip up a spray with a little baby soap, some baby oil, and water and we spritz the wipes as we use them. I know it sounds crazy, but after using disposable wipes and having to fish them out of the diapers and then have them sit in the trash (do you know how long it takes to fill a trash can with just wipes?), the cloth wipes are SO much easier.
It's all about setting up a system. We use a regular plastic trashcan with a lid and a waterproof pail liner that we throw right into the wash with the diapers. There's a little patch of felt in the bag that I sprinkle with lavender and tea tree oil to eliminate smells.
And the KEY to removing "solids" from the diapers is a sprayer we hooked up to our toilet so there is no touching the nasty stuff.
Best of all (for me) is that this is all Daddy-approved. My husband is wonderful, but he feels the same way about poop as these guys:


But even my poop-hating husband (and babysitter, visitors, etc.) feel like cloth diapers are easy (been using the same ones for 8+ months). There's is a huge wealth of information over at the CottonBabies blog, but I just wanted to add my $.02.