I get my eggs from a girl named Katie. Her mother has chickens and Katie brings the eggs to work every Monday. They’re $1.50 a dozen. The yolks are bright, bright yellow. The eggshells are fragile and colored brown and beige and blue. They are the best eggs I’ve ever eaten and I’m shattered to tell you that Katie is going on maternity leave in a few weeks and my egg affair will end for awhile.

The old ways. When what you ate came from people you knew and animals that had been raised on the land instead of  in a feed lot. It didn’t matter to me not so long ago. I was happy to get my lamb chops in a Styrofoam tray and my pork shoulders in a plastic bag. But as our food choices become more limited as big agribusiness decides what you will eat and where it will come from, consider this. There are foods that will transport you and they do not come from Tyson or Wal-Mart.

Tonight, I resurrected a package of West Wind Farms hot sage pork sausage from the freezer. Quite honestly, I’d forgotten that I’d bought it at the Farmer’s Market last summer.

DSCN0662I fried them up with some skillet potatoes so the grease from the sausage could permeate the potatoes. Oh, my goodness. The sausages come from hogs that are raised on grass. The meat is smoked by hand. The casings crackle when you cut into them. They are meaty beyond description and transporting. I know I paid a pretty penny for them in July, but I don’t remember how much in November.

My spiritual food adviser, Terrell, knows by instinct that food that is grown by real people and cured or processed by those same people is by far superior than anything you will find in a grocery store.  For him, this is the way he was raised.  His family grew their own food, butchered their own meat and relied on precious little else to keep food on the table. By the way, Terrell is going through a Grape Kool-Aid phase right now that I don’t quite understand, but it may have been the only processed food he ever had as a child.

The sad fact is that most Americans today can’t afford the West Wind Farms sausage we ate tonight for supper. Home grown food is now an antique, an after-thought in the world of convenience and packaged processed foods with ingredients that I can neither pronounce nor understand.

I am not a food snob. You know I love my Velveeta. But tonight, I paused for more than a second to ponder, regrettably, the world that Terrell inhabited that I will never know.

One Comment

  1. Howard Lewis
    November 12, 2009 at 8:22 pm

    Wow!
    For years I have been ordering my lamb casing Hot Dogs & Sausages from a speciality meat market inWahoo Nebraska. They are now out of business and here I find “West Wind”. I can’t wait to order several items.
    Thank you, Catherine!

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