Are you trying to do your part by purchasing organic and local groceries? The best way to do both is to frequent your local farmers market. Even if a not all of the venders are certified organic they use better practices than industrial farmers just because they are smaller scale. They might even be organic but not certified because certifications are expensive. Some products are harder than others to find at your farmers market, milk for example.
Try drinking “raw milk” it is untreated which may seem scary but humans owned their own goats and cows, drinking their milk straight from the udder for centuries before industrial farming took over.  Many people argue that skim milk, which has become the milk of choice by most American’s, has hardly any nutritional value because it has been so processed and watered down.
Many brands advertize themselves as organic and paint a pretty picture of free range cows that have “access” to acres of pasture but usually they are using sneaky wording to create a false image.  Make sure that the extra money you’re spending to get the organic label is money well spent. The Cornucopia Institute created a rating of dairy producers: http://cornucopia.org/dairysurvey/FarmID_153.html and I was surprised to see that the top rated milk producer was in my own sate of Pennsylvania. Find out how the milk you’ve been drinking compares.
If you want to experiment with raw milk find a distributor near you: http://www.realmilk.com/where2.html and remember that it tastes great!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 10:37 am and is filed under Smarter Green Choices, What to Buy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.