About food and love for animals

I've always nurtured some sort of farming dreams. When I was younger, I used to spend my weekends at farms outside of my home town, prepared to do any kind of heavy or dirty tasks as long as I got to be close to the horses, sheep, cows and chickens. This love for animals and farm life has stayed with me throughout the years. For a couple of years, me and a group of friends were toying with the idea of moving out to the country side, growing our own vegetables, raising our own animals, living green and closer to nature. As usual, money was always the issue and nothing ever came out of it. Some people, however, take this step. 

I recently came across Big picture farm, run by Louisa Conrad and Lucas Farrell in Vermont. They produce goat milk caramels and cheese that I would love to try, were I closer to the states, and they blog about the farm and their animals here. Conrad, who is an artist, also runs the blog Icelandic butterflies where you can see some of her beautiful photographs. These blogs keep me reading for hours. The love, respect and what could best be described as... tenderness?... they have for their animals is so obvious in each and every blog post and it's impossible to not be completely fascinated with their way of living. I love the idea of small scale farming and production - obviously also when it comes to meat production. For me, it's truly the only way. I think it's safe to say that we all know that the bigger, industrial farms will do nothing for your health, for the dignity of the animals or for the environment. Me myself, I've been a vegetarian for the last 20 years and will most likely keep eating my greens for the rest of my life but if you do eat meat, there are great farmers out there who actually give a damn about their animals and about how and what they produce. For anyone interested in these matters, I would strongly suggest reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. It's a great, non condescending book by someone who has tried eating meat as well as eating vegetarian and it investigates factory farming in the U.S. I've recommended this book to loads of friends, vegetarians as well as meat eaters, and everyone I know who've read it, had something good to say about it. Several also stopped eating chicken, but that's another story. 

Anyways, head over to the Big picture farm blogs if you're interested in lovingly produced food and beautiful photography. 

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