A Trip to the Farm

I took the kiddos to a local farm for their annual Apple Butter Day, where they make apple butter the old-fashioned way: in a copper kettle over an open fire! It was truly a great day. While we were there, we took a hayride and saw one of the surrounding family farms. We watched cows, sheep, and horses grazing lazily in the fields, turkeys actually running around and puffing up trying to impress the ladies, and chickens pecking at bugs and trying to find some shade (it has been unseasonably warm this year). When they realized we weren't bringing food, they soon lost interest in us and went back to scratching. In the afternoon, we ate dinner, complete with butter so yellow it looked like margarine. Except that it wasn't. It was the real thing. Not like those white sticks you buy at the grocery store, oh no! I'm talking real butter. Spread on home-made bread, it was just about the best thing I've ever eaten in my life.

It was so wonderful to be able to see where my food, the food that I feed my kids, comes from. Every time I hear of a salmonella or e.Coli outbreak, I can rest easy: I know where my food came from. And if I needed to, I could probably track down the cow from my plate back to it's birth, and everyone who handled it in between. I pay good money for good food, but the piece of mind is priceless.

I developed a hypothesis about food when I was in college. At that time, I knew very little about actual nutrition, I basically starved myself to be thin, and, not coincidentally, I was sick, sick, sick all of the time. But oddly enough, I still have my little hypothesis, and the more I learn about nutrition and real food, the more I think I was right on the mark. Basically, I believe that if God made a food, our bodies can process it and use it. And if man made a food, it's poison and will kill you very slowly, painfully, and most likely, expensively.

Here are a few pictures. It was really one of the best days.