Does Your Kid Eat Lunch at Your Government School?

It has long been a big joke: lunch room food sucks! Those of us who have eaten at a school cafeteria know how often this is a justifiable complaint from our kids. But it turns out that there may be more to it than just kids complaining.

This article is a couple of months old, but bears re-visiting. According to USA Today, it seems that fast-food chains have tougher, more stringent testing for meat than meat served in your local government-run school.

“We simply are not giving our kids in schools the same level of quality and safety as you get when you go to many fast-food restaurants,” says J. Glenn Morris, professor of medicine and director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. “We are not using those same standards.”

Even Jack-in-the-Box, notorious for e.coli deaths a few years back, has standards ten times what the USDA requires for school meat. Schools are even given chicken that Campbell’s and KFC reject, chicken most often reserved for pet food. Anyway, read the whole thing here. And go get your kid something from Burger King for crying out loud!

Leave it to Me…

…to say I am going to revive this blog and then not write a thing. Truth is everyone in the house except my little girl has found themselves sick over the past few weeks, and the illness just happen to choose both the wife and I at the same time. Massive chest colds, ear infections, all the normal fun stuff. Even with all the meds prescribed, the only thing that eased my cough and took the edge off of the pain was a good single malt scotch. I prefer Glenmorangie when I can find it, but Glenlivet isn’t far behind. 

Anyway, we are both on the back end of this thing, though neither of us feel really great. It does make me wonder what would happen if we were full time homesteaders, something that we have talked about with frequency. It scares me a bit to think that getting sick with a chest cold could really set you back in terms of food planted/grown/harvested/sold/consumed. Of course, lots os stuff scares me about the prospect of full time homesteading. Aside from the obvious – like the fact that our jobs currently keep us in suburban surroundings – we can’t just run up and run to a live on a compound in another state far away from civilization. Besides, I happen to like some the amenities afforded by living in a place like ours. I know it sounds crazy, but I like knowing that there is an excellent sushi place close. I don’t want to live somewhere so far out that the closest store or hospital is 45 minutes or an hour away. 

As much as I loved the PBS mini-series Frontier House, I don’t want to live in another century. Sorry, I enjoyed watching the Super Bowl and having a couple of ice cold beers. I think this is the real kicker. My wife and I know that we don’t like suburban cul de sac life and want something different. That’s why we are growing a lot of our own food and buying meat farmer direct and all sorts of other things. We feel like it is going somewhere, we just aren’t real sure where.

Monday’s Merton

We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. – Thomas Merton

Can Farming Save Detroit?

I think it is fascinating that this is where we are as a culture. My secretary is from Detroit, and describes it as a wasteland, with entire neighborhoods once filled with families and children turned into ghost towns. A vacant lot here or there planted with viable crops could change the face of the city. Of course, what this guy is talking about is a huge industrial-agricultural complex, not family farming:

 

“This is possibly not as crazy as it sounds. Granted, the notion of devoting valuable city land to agriculture would be unfathomable in New York, London, or Tokyo. But Detroit is a special case. The city that was once the fourth largest in the country and served as a symbol of America’s industrial might has lately assumed a new role: North American poster child for the global phenomenon of shrinking postindustrial cities.” (read it all)

Starting Over

I originally started this blog back in June of 2008. I failed to maintain it. Then I tried again and it ended up becoming a political rantfest  because it was right in the middle of the elections and I had such a seething hatred for the candidates. So I let it go again, only to return and clean up some of the more angry political speech and tried again. Nothing. Mostly I just suffered from a  malaise that kept me from doing much of anything good or useful on the blog or in-real-life.

I wrote a post back in December of 2009 where I simply said I wanted to get back on track with our family’s desire to live a different kind of suburban existence and transform our quarter acre plot into a suburban homestead where we strive to learn both the skills and ideals that it takes to become self-sufficient.

I’d like to do some regular features each week, like a recap of homesteading activities, a quote or a thought of the week from those I draw inspiration from (Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, Joel Salatin, Henry David Thoreau, etc), reviews of tools, techniques and books and other things that may be of interest to people interested in alternative suburban living.

I’ll try hard to keep the politics to a minimum, but I am sure they emerge in way or another.

I hope I can get my lovely wife to write some pieces as well.

Anyway, we’ll give Suburban Resistance one more go and see what happens. Some of the older posts may re-appear as updated posts in the future.

-Robb

Harder Than I Thought

I guess that title could apply to a lot of things. It seems that most things in my life have proven harder than I thought it would. Perhaps this is a good thing…I am at least able to convince myself and my family to give things a whirl that we may not other wise try. So it has been with this whole notion of suburban homesteading. It has been difficult. At times, it has been exceedingly difficult. It is not that the work in the garden and such isn’t enjoyable. I love being outside with my hands digging in the dirt. But it seems like as a family we have lost some of the steam that we had in making this dream of moving toward self-sufficiency. I feel like I carry the blame for most of this. We aren’t composting, which is something I was once very dogmatic about. We have been eating out a lot. We actually left vegetables on the vine this year to basically rot. We’ve been buying meat from the grocery (something I abhor). We’ve been getting tons of rain and the water barrel isn’t even set up. In other words, we have slipped back into some of our old, bad habits and I really hate it. 

I’ve been thinking of kicking this blog back up if for no other reason than to give me some sort of accountability for the things I want to do around here to be more self-sufficient. It may not be as easy as it appears in Mother Earth News, but I need to do something. Our culture, our world, it is changing. It needs to change. I would rather change now and be able to learn and hand down skills to my children than to be caught with the ability to supply for my family when it is no longer feasible to transport our food from far away locales.