The organic movement has important and valuable goals, but it doesn’t cover everything. I already explained my choice for buying less-processed food over more-processed organic food products. Today the rationale is about sustainability and community.
We’ve been buying organic milk for a while but recently decided to switch to milk from a local farm and creamery instead. The farm is within a half hour from us, but all the local stores carry the milk.
They sell all varieties of milk–whole down to skim. They even sell “creamline milk” which means it is non-homogenized and is what our home cheesemaking books recommend for best results. They also sell flavored milk (like chocolate) and even sell eggnog from November through the New Year (though I prefer mine homemade). They also sell little quarts of cream.
The milk comes in glass bottles which help to naturally keep the milk cooler and more fresh, you return the bottles to the store for a $2.75 return on the bottles. So while it seems like the milk costs as much as organic milk –you get half of it back. Plus it is just really cool to send the bottles back to be reused–even though we took all our plastic milk cartons to the recycling center–this still seems better. The dairy trucks drop off fresh milk and pick up the rinsed out bottles in the same trip, so though I’m sure it uses more fuel on the return trip, they aren’t making extra trips for the bottles.
The cows of this farm are fed a diet primarily grown by the farmers themselves on their farmland. If cows are sick they are treated in seclusion until they are healthy and their milk is clean. All the milk from the farm is lab-tested on-site to be antibiotic-free. So–though it is not “organic” there are a lot of things that we really like about this two brothers, plus wives, plus children-run family business.
Supporting local agriculture and communities is something we value highly. It’s interesting to read about the farm and their ideals and how they felt like they could choose to become a big factory-farm or just try to really specialize and do something really well, providing a great resource to the community and actually being members of the community by things like holding farm tours, and fall-festivals, and even selling soft-serve ice cream from the on-site farm store for fun.
So maybe it would be better if the milk was organic-but maybe not. Maybe it would be better if it was raw? I’m not so sure–I do know of a local farm that sells raw milk (which can only be sold direct from the farm in the state of Kansas) but I’m still un-decided on the topic of raw. Jeremy wants his own cow and I’m sure if we had our own cow we would drink the milk raw. . . But the last issue is that of grassfed versus everything-else-fed. If we could find a source of dairy products from grass-fed cows that would be my first choice–what I would consider to be the best option–even if it was not organic.
So generally I am choosing to support local and [more] sustainable over organic. The same holds true for a local flour mill–it’s not organic, but it’s local, it’s supporting family-sized businesses, and the flour from the local mill comes in 25 pound-bags which is more economical and has less waste. (That is another big pet peeve of mine for organic products–many of them are packaged in such small portions as to not make the price overwhelming–but for my family of five those portion sizes are not realistic and mean a lot more packaging waste by my using them.)
I didn’t get to the “what” and “whys” of the organic that I do buy, so that will have to be another post for another day, but now I’m off to spend time with my family and enjoy our Christmas festivities. I’ll return to writing my Urban Pioneer Story here later next week.
Happy Holidays!
Urban Pioneer Story 
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