Ok, ok. Next post will be a wardrobe one. I swear.
Today I want to share a small win of mine lately: I found a near(ish) source for dairy, eggs, and meat! That’s been a tough one to check off my list. We get a summer/early autumn CSA share, and I order bulk goods from Azure Standard or fill my own jars at the local co-op. But finding local raw dairy and pastured meat has been one heck of a journey.
Background info: it’s illegal for farmers to advertise selling raw milk in the state of Minnesota. I have been trying to contact drop site owners via Facebook, join groups that go in on pickup sites, or contact farms listed on realmilk.com for a while now. This is probably my 5th? 6th? attempt to reach out to a source.
(Ridiculously, the law also states to bring your own containers to be filled on the farm, so I’m off to hunt down a couple of 64oz mason jars this weekend!)
I told Eric last night that I had victory! in my search. He was happy–I mean, who wouldn’t be, local milk and cream is delicious–but also laughing at my excitement.
Since I started thinking about careers in college, frequently I’ve felt lost and left behind. Until recently.
At 16, I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and fell in love with the idea and practice of reconnecting with my food. I read countless books and watched documentaries about the food industry and its environmental (and health) impacts, books about homesteading and ancestral diets. I started shopping locally and seasonally and meeting my farmers. Growing my own food, or trying to! Learning traditional skills like baking bread and making yogurt.
My interest has taken me from the Mountain View Farmer’s Market to a mushroom farm on the Mississippi River. From working a day on a farm in rural Minnesota, earning some serious blisters on my hands, to years in the Carleton greenhouse, to countless chats with my mom listening to her green thumbed-gardening advice. From picking raspberries and canning the jam in my parents’ kitchens, to hunting down raw dairy for my family (something I never thought I’d do as I was scared of the contamination aspect until I started digging deeper).
And it never feels like work or something I have to do. No one else cares if I do these things; I genuinely want to. I can talk for hours about all that I’ve learned and done in this area.
In college, I was always trying to find “socially acceptable careers” that took me as close as possible to this interest. Because gasp I needed to do something intellectual with my life!
But then I got married young and had a couple kids and decided being socially acceptable was overrated anyways.
I realized I did have a passion and calling in life: local, whole foods.
And deep down, it isn’t about the environment, health, or supporting local economies. Well, it’s about all those things, and something more: self-sufficiency.
I believe people who feel called to this interest, and who eventually want to hack it on a homestead like me, are people who have recognized a very primitive and essential desire within themselves to be connected to their means of survival. (Hence my tangential interests in handicrafts, minimalism, low-tech life, low-intervention medical care, “prepping,” entrepreneurship and a wholeee host of other things.)
When I read AVM ten years ago, I felt like I had rediscovered what it meant to be a human being at its core. I still feel that way. I still remember the combination of shock, fear, and hope that I felt a few pages into the book when I set it down and went to look in our pantry–and realized I had no idea where any of that food came from. A whole world opened up to me in that moment, which was the start of a lifelong journey.
So, as Mary Oliver writes: “Tell me, what is it that you want to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I still don’t know that I have a clear answer at this point in time. Ultimately, I want to homestead. I would love to meet a few other families with similar goals, go in on land together and create our own little self-sufficient community. Bake bread and raise our kids and cows together.
(I hope my own extended family and some college friends would follow someday if I lead by example, haha.)
Experience failure together. Because that’s a huge part of that lifestyle. Pick each other up, laugh it off–or have a good cry–and keep going.
That’s the dream!
This is getting too long already, so I’ll wrap it up now. Thanks for coming to my TED talk about raw milk, Barbara Kingsolver, and my future commune ;P