Let me tell you why I'm doing this . . . .

Over the last year I've been making a lot of changes in the way I view food. It started with a move away from processed foods for my whole family (the dog included) and we began examining ingredients more carefully and shopping the outside edge of the grocery store. Then, this past summer I found some lumps in my throat that the specialist I was referred to described as nodules in my thyroid; they were unable to get a good samples so I was told what my chances were that this was cancer. Being really stubborn, I refuse to admit that my body could turn on me like that without me having any symptoms, so after talking to the doctor, I was given 6 months to try to eliminate these things on my own. I want to an accupuncturist and Chinese herbologist who recommended I follow an anti-inflamatory diet, including cutting out all sources of animal protein but fish. Without going into a long explaination, this made me start doing a lot more reading about healthy eating and the effects of what we eat on long-term health, particularly related to cancer. I've now passed the 6 months and the "nodules" still aren't gone, but the doctor has said I can continue on this path as long as I get regular checkups to make sure nothing has changed. However, I am making a move away from the pescatarian diet and beginning to again eat animal proteins but instead being very careful about the sources.

The reading I've done talks so much about how the chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, etc. . . leach into our food system and into our bodies and our bodies don't know what to do with all these things. So, in going natural, the best way I found to do that was to go local, so I know where the food came from, can see where it was raised or grown and come into contact with it before it heads for my dinner table; so I joined a CSA. If you don't know what that it, it stand for "Community Supported Agriculture," it basically means for the next 3 months I've purchased a share in a farm, in exchange I get to pick up my share of the products of the farm once a week.

This begins my encounter with eating local.