grow my own food

I’ve just watched a documentary about what really goes into our food (‘What’s Really in Our Food?’)....and gosh, it’s made me more than ever want to stick with and achieve this goal fully.
It seems that packaging is everything – and it fools and misleads so many. Rules are bent and laws only just adhered to.

Some of the shocking things I learnt from the programme:

• Many products for pork like to use the description: ‘Outdoor bred’, but the pigs actually spend 80% of their time indoors. They spend only their first 4 weeks outdoors.
• Food labels only have to say where the product was produced – not where the ingredients are from. For example the chicken in a ready meal could come from….Tanzania, but as the product was put together in the UK – that’s the county listed on the box.
• Most egg boxes state that the eggs are Class A eggs, making it sounds like they’re high quality….but Class B eggs are illegal to sell to the public. Also, many eggs boxes state that the eggs are fresh – that just means they’re ‘legally’ fresh.
• Products such as pies contain a mixture of different ingredients – and even though the label may say it contains pork/chicken….it could contain the less desirable parts, such as (and the example in the programme): pork fat with connective tissues, pig skin, reformed ham, mechanically recovered chicken.
• Organic ‘ready to eat’ salads are very often washed with more than just water – an organic wash product is used, and a few times these products have been found to contain small quantities of chemicals (one in particular – antifreeze).
• Some factories re-use old meat which has nearly, or has indeed passed it’s use-by date – they mince and mix it up and add it to new products.
• Some fish and chip shops had been replacing cod with the much cheaper catfish.
• So much chicken contains added water, which hugely increase the size of the chicken. Protein powder is added to the water to hold it in….this protein is quite often from beef and pork.

They say it’s not dangerous…but it certainly is misleading. I want to know just what I am eating, and know that it is all ethical and fresh. Nothing can be much more satisfying than growing your own food, taking care of it, watching it grow and finally enjoying it with the satisfaction of knowing where it has come from and how it was grown.

It’s better for me and the environment!

I shamefully don’t know much about plants/seeds and such. I’m not sure what I can grow where, when it must be planted, how to look after it, etc! But surely it can’t be too difficult, because after all, it’s nature….

The first step has been taken today, though, with us buying a strawberry plant. I’m very excited about it and the prospect of having my very own grown strawberries!