Why go the grocery when it could
be delivered right to your door… direct from the grower… for less money… and
for a truly verified, real-world, honest-to-goodness natural food?
We started our meat company in
2000 with a simple vision to market our healthful, wholesome and honest meat. We
quickly gained access to over 1500 grocery stores in every state in the Union,
as well as Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
Those were the days when regular mom-and-pop stores were sprouting up all over the US due to the mass of consumers that made the connection between their health and the quality and wholesomeness of their food. These small business folks, with help from suppliers like us, opened thousands and thousands of natural health food stores stocked with the very best products they could find. But things changed, and we exited this part of the business about a year ago.
Have you noticed that those
mom-and-pop stores are now virtually all gone?
Have you noticed that the big corporate chains have either bought them
out or run them out of business? What happened, and does it matter to you as a
consumer?
The short answer is, YES, it
matters a lot to you as a consumer!
You see, the link between the
actual grower and the final purveyor (your local health food store) has been
supplanted by a huge marketing and distribution channel that favors big and
cheap. If this sounds familiar, it’s
because you’ve seen it happen in almost every other consumer category before.
While this big and cheap model may
work to the benefit of consumers of washing machines, it’s surely not such a
wonderful thing for consumers of food or the environment we all live in.
You see, man, with the help of all
sorts of modern shortcuts, can indeed make food big and cheap. If you are only
concerned about price, that may seem like a blessing. But educated consumers have discovered the real,
hidden costs of “cheap, big” food.
Instead of filling your body with a
nutrient dense, natural sustenance, this cheap and big “Hollywood Food” is all about
good-looking empty calories and products that are often far from the natural
claims they may make.
Let me break those two thoughts
down.
Empty Calories
Man has figured out how to grow multiples
more grain per acre and get animals to slaughter weight in just a fraction of
the time it used to take. What may seem
like a miracle is not really a miracle at all. Advanced plant and animal
breeding, oil-based fertilizers and chemicals have made this possible. However, what was never accounted for was the
loss of soil fertility due to the artificial fertilizers and the resultant tremendous
loss of nutritional content of our food.
“A Kushi Institute analysis
of nutrient data from 1975 to 1997 found that average calcium levels in 12
fresh vegetables dropped 27 percent; iron levels 37 percent; vitamin A levels
21 percent, and vitamin C levels 30 percent. A similar study of British
nutrient data from 1930 to 1980, published in the British Food Journal,
found that in 20 vegetables the average calcium content had declined 19
percent; iron 22 percent; and potassium 14 percent. Yet another study concluded
that one would have to eat eight oranges today to derive the same amount of
Vitamin A as our grandparents would have gotten from one.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
What that adds up to is empty
calories. Your body is not truly
satiated when you eat because it needs more than just calories, so you eat more to compensate. There are many in the scientific community
now that are tying poor soil health, advanced crop and animal breeding practices
and these new Hollywood Foods to not only the obvious obesity epidemic, but to
all sorts of other human health related problems.
I
guess we’ve begun to discover to “Let food be
thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Actually, Hippocrates said that somewhere
around 400 BC!
Your
body is designed to function best when provided with nutrient dense, whole foods. These foods only come from whole, healthy
soils and from plants and animals that are given the time and space to properly
mature into the fullness of nutrition that God intended.
Can
we make it cheaper? Sure, but look at
the cost!
Stay
tuned for more about what is happening to the natural claims in this big and
cheap food model…