I don’t have anything intelligent to add right now, but wanted to say that I’m impressed with some of the steps that folks take to do this right. (And, also, overwhelmed - but I guess if it was easy it wouldn’t be a discussion).
I am in the Boston area. PM me if you want to chat more specifically about very local stuff.
Meantime I will cook up a few responses and make an actual thread contribution. 
SDR, thank you. I thought Urban Orchard might be a place to look at, and funnily enough, a friend recommended True Nature to me just a couple weeks ago, as a place to get spices in bulk for cheap. I intend to check it out one of these days…
Has anyone come across any concrete info on Trader Joe’s organic dairy and/or cage free eggs? Everything I’ve tried to Google basically sums up “We don’t really know where it came from.” Much as I try to eat ethically, it’s really difficult on a limited income.
Hoping not to turn this into an extended hijack, but the world is every bit as unlikely to convert to careful ethical analysis of its food sources and adopt your painstaking methods as it is to go vegan.
It might in fact be simpler to go vegan.
Yes, but industrial vegetable agriculture is just as bad as industrial livestock. Being vegan doesn’t fix that problem; it just puts you back to square one with a slightly different question. Over farming/soil depletion, water use/ water table issues, petrochemical fertilizers, GM crops, etc.
Meat from hunters may also be an option. The post summary - if you’re interested, call the government agency in charge of hunting / fishing in your state and ask for an education. Make sure they advise you of legal and health concerns, and then maybe they can also find you a way to get connected.
I assume that hunting is not your personal realm of possibility / inclination - I’m sure you would have mentioned it if so. If you have any friends who hunt, though, they might be an occasional source of meat. There are also websites that will put you in touch with people willing to donate wild game when they take more than they can use. I can’t recommend a specific one, though, since they are often state-specific in order to comply just one set of state laws.
Be careful if you get wild game, though! Legally speaking, there can be laws that you should research - for instance, North Carolina does not allow hunters to sell deer meat, but it may be donated or given to a friend as a gift. You also don’t want an unscrupulous hunter who exceeds his legal game limit. Health-wise, you don’t know where the animal has lived, what it’s eaten, if it was sick when killed (especially if you don’t butcher it yourself), and must trust in how the individual hunter has handled, stored, and processed the meat. Planning-wise, you’re limited by the hunting seasons and the amount that happens to get donated.
On the plus side, wild game is generally very lean and good for you - a deer can’t pack on the fat like farmed cattle do and expect to survive in the wild. You also get the benefit of knowing that the animal lived as much like it was designed / evolved to as possible in the modern world, and I would also argue that a hunter’s bullet is generally a relatively swift and humane death (as compared to a trip through the average slaughterhouse). I also call the variety of meat a bonus, as you might wind up with venison, bear, elk, duck, turkey, various fish, and any number of different options.
True. But we don’t need to make the whole world do it, we just need enough people to do it to achieve sufficient critical mass that it is worth it (in the economic sense) to become a viable alternative. Once the option is available, people may choose to eat ethically produced food because it is a comparable price, it has social cachet (I can dream, can’t I), because it’s just there.
I’m more consumer than citizen, and my real vote is with my dollars. And I do vote, even if it is only one vote out of millions.
-troubledwater, who is gradually moving this way, and on a $160 monthly food budget
troubledwater says it well. Without supporting the ethical farmers there won’t be any ethical farmers, and they’re the ones paving the way to get farming back to what it should be. Will that ever happen? Dunno. But I feel it has a better chance than making everyone stop eating meat altogether. We gotta start somewhere. (Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms is an interesting guy - and they have courses for people wanting to get into farming sustainably.)
Save for the chicken/beef farm, these family farms I’m buying from have been doing this for less than 10 years. When/if we can get the prices down a bit, and also maybe convince more people that geez, you don’t have to eat meat every meal (Meatless Mondays is a start!), I think many people will choose the more ethical option. There’s still a lot of educating to do, and I also think trying to convince meat eaters to go the ethical route is far less of a turnoff than trying to get them to go vegan.
And I think the way I eat is just about as difficult as being vegan. There are a couple more restaurants I can eat at, Chicago has a few nice farm-to-table places where I can eat their meat dish offerings, plus all the vegan/vegetarian restaurants. I still have to read labels carefully (why do they have to put whey in jalapeno potato chips??) and stock my pantry with everything vegan (one exception, fresh wild-caught salmon in season right now, not the pantry, the fridge!), choose non-animal products to wear, and have to eschew fast food entirely. I still have to eat before going to family gatherings and make sure I bring a dish I know I can eat!
I do also try whenever I can to support local fruit and vegetable farmers, Hello Again is right about industrial agriculture, and I don’t necessarily look for organic labeling - many local and small family farms are already using organic or at least IPM, so I go for that whenever the seasons and my pocketbook permit. I’m very excited the farmer’s markets are all open again!
That, and getting enough of the middle class on board to push prices down enough for it to be a viable option for the poor. There are a lot of poor people, who would certainly appreciate having better options than beans n rice in bulk, and once they have access to join in, I think critical mass will shortly follow. Factory farming is supported by tons of people having to buy the cheapest shit available because that’s all they can afford. If they could afford better, there would certainly be some of them buying it more often.
YES! Our local market was Wednesday. I’d forgotten how much more flavor real, in-season strawberries have than greenhouse-grown ones do. We finished off two quarts in three days.
I realize the answer will change by location, but some of you talked about corn-fed as a bad thing. May I ask why is it bad, when is it bad and what is supposed to be the best way? I can see corn-fed being suboptimum for cows, but for hens it’s what I’m used to in traditional farming (not just corn, other cereals as well, plus whatever the hens scrounge).
We (in the United States) eat a lot of beef.
Beef: Per Capita Consumption Summary Selected Countries (to 2006)
Someone else will be along shortly to explain this better, but my understanding is that cows are well-designed to eat grass, but less so to eat corn. Cows fed a diet consisting primarily of corn produce biochemically different meat than grass-fed cows, I’m thinking here of Omega 6 vs Omega 3 fats, but I’m sure there are other differences. And we humans are evolved to benefit from Omega 3s, which we are not getting from corn fed cows. We are similarly screwed by the milk produced by corn-fed cows. That may sound trivial, but a diet with a high ratio of Omega 6 fatty acids is implicated in a lot of the unhealthy American lifestyle conditions such as heart disease and strokes.
We grow millions of acres of corn to feed cows - draining the Ogallala aquifer in the process, and also producing (and subsequently leaching) millions of tons to nitrogen fertilizers in the process.
From a health perspective, and, on the surface, from an environmental perspective, it seems to be a better idea to eat a smaller quantity of expensive grass-fed beef than a larger quantity of corn-fed beef. I’m not as sure about the environmental part, because grass can’t be produced without some environmental damage, either.
As for the chickens, you mentioned “other cereals as well, plus whatever the hens scrounge.” Factory-farmed chickens get what they get (too much corn) and don’t scrounge. So again we get a scenario where the animal spends most of its life suffering in order to produce food that is not even delivering optimal nutrition.
To me, choosing to eat a mostly vegetarian/vegan diet supplemented by small quantities of ethically/sustainably produced animal products isn’t “cheating” if the objective is to be healthy and promote a more sustainable system.
troubledwater hit the nail on the head regarding corn - it’s cheap roughage that’s not as good for the animals as what should naturally constitute the bulk of their diet, and we produce way to much corn for various reasons. To me, it can also be a partial indicator of someone’s farming philosophy. If a farmer feeds his animals on cheap corn rather than making a more appropriate diet available to them, where else is he cutting costs? In living space, in medical care, in slaughtering practices?
Thanks for this discussion… We’ve pretty much stopped all meat and dairy because of how animals are treated, but I was wondering about small farms who still raise animals ethically.
I’m not sure we’re ready to go back to eating meat, but at finding out about Organic Valley is a great starting point.
In NYC Farmer’s markets are set up to accept SNAP (food stamps) and the City gives out Health Bucks as an incentive to use SNAP at Farmer’s markets.
My CSA also offers half-priced shares for low income families. We members pay a little extra to subsidize the half-price shares. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to subsidize or discount our meat & dairy deliveries the way its done now.
In addition to what was already said, since the cows have a hard time digesting corn they get sick more, so they put sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics in the feed to prevent this. This can contribute to evolution of antibiotic resistent bacteria meaning less effective antibiotics for human use.
The “best way” is grass fed. The cows graze the fields, then the chickens come by and eat the worms growing in the cow poop, and this helps spread out the manure which fertilizes the fields. The cows can digest the grass, and don’t have to take unneccesary antibiotics.
You can’t argue with this guys logic behind going vegan 
www. Go Vegan Muthafucka - YouTube (language NSFW)
This bill is very relevant to the thread:
If HSUS says its bad, it’s probably good.
If you think they are the same people who actually operate shelters, you would be wrong.
From my own experience (and I am very imperfect on these issues, but I do try) the biggest hurdle was getting used to using “weird” cuts of meat, and using a LOT less meat. But, I will say, the meat you have is better, and if you cut back on the amount (which, let’s face it, most of us should) you don’t have to spend more. And obviously it’s better for you, health-wise.
As far as where we get the meat, we are lucky enough to be near several farmer’s markets, and we mail order very occasionally. It’s hard, and the more you do, the more it seems like you ought to do. Once I started cooking “from scratch” all the time, I started feeling bad about buying stuff like boxed stock. So, I made my own stock. Oh, but the veggies could be fresher. Ok, start a garden. But don’t use commercial fertilizer! So, I’m also learning to lighten up a bit, because it’s important to try, but you can really make yourself nuts over it.
I think this is a very important point and bears repeating. My teenage daughter considers herself a “pescetarian” for health and ethical reasons. I want to impress upon her that by removing herself from the “meat” equation entirely, she has essentially neutralized her vote and her dollars. By leaving the game altogether, you will not been helping make any difference in a system with which you do not agree. IMHO.