organics

My friend N. called me yesterday to tell me she just got her period.  "What is the Green Mama approach to dealing with this?" she asked.  N. was new to green, but had already begun cloth diapering her baby, ate local foods, and had generally become curious about many things she used to take for granted.  I am always surprised when women ask me about this issue, but I shouldn't.  It's a big one: expensive in dollars, health effects, and waste. 

Milk is a $20-some billion industry.  Millions of dollars are spent by dairy producers and processors to advertise milk through such campaigns as Got Milk? and Milk: It does a body good.  What, however, has been the human cost of making milk into big money?

My solution to all scary agricultural news is to buy local and to buy organic. I understand that this is classicist, but my guilt is outweighed by my belief that it offers me a modicum of safety from things, like, the melamine scare.

When I was young, my family was poor. I ate the school lunch because I got it for free. Though it was rarely my only meal of the day, it was often my main meal of the day. Still, I remember when I was 7 years old biting into the hotdog on my tray and my best friend telling me, “Do you know what that is made out of?” Hotdogs were the first food that I gave up out of principle.