With snow on the ground and brilliant male cardinals flitting in the forsythia bushes outside my window, I'm catching up on desk work, which includes a manuscript titled  "Farm to Fork Meat Riot" written by Niti Bali.  She wants me to write the foreword to it.  Extremely powerful.  I'll copy a few paragraphs to give you flavor:

 Here is how I want people to start thinking about these things.

It matters how you source your nutrition and the only way that you can nourish your physical body is to use the highest quality life giving force that is only found from the soil that is managed with thoughtful husbandry and with the orchestration of livestock on the soil. The soil requires massaging and the desiccation of the heritage livestock and then it also requires heirloom seeds that are not genetically altered by institutions, so there needs to be seed involved. The grasses, weeds & other amazing garden plants need to be drilled into the soil with a seed drill followed by the massaging of the land with the livestock that should dance in mobs over the land on a rotation. Once this symphony of love is drilled into the soil and then it is massaged and desiccated on with organic natural fertilizers from the rears of all the heritage livestock that are capable of doing the deed and reproducing on their own without the hand of an institution, you begin to find life giving force in and on and over the land.

When people ask me to provide them with the science and the case studies and the blood work and the human analysis and evidence that this is the way life giving force works I just say, “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!”

Do you need scientific proof to know that those creatures that are industrialized in buildings are of equal health and life force as the ones who are free to eat outside on bountiful paddocks of pasture all day, consuming the highest quality plant material while basking in the life force of the sun as they touch their feet to the life giving soil and breathe in the clean and crisp air?

No- the answer is NO you do not need this proof. You are seeking excuses not to see the truth because it is so difficult for you to understand how to stop this cycle. You have been made to believe this lifestyle is unaffordable and unmanageable and probably unavailable. The institutions that are able to operate without any legal ramifications are the same people who educated you and made you believe that this logical fact is to be questioned. Did you also know that institutions do not apologize. Institutions do not ever admit to being wrong. The only way to shift the beliefs of an institution is to shift the beliefs of the people who created it. Institutions will be the first to rebuke anyone who goes against their proclamations. They will defend their stance until the people who created it decide to change.

My chiropractor and dear friend said to me, “Niti, people these days will require the empirical evidence to show how much better this food is vs. what is cheaper and found in abundance everywhere.” He might be right. I will not defend life giving force folks. It does not require a defense. You either participate and glean the life force and the power it graces you with or you do not. I am uninterested in investing in this “proof” because I know my own experience which is far more convincing than a report from a person who is subjective based on whoever is paying them. I will not participate in a distracting contest of whose scientist was able to compile the most convincing evidence to change your mind. Folks, I am not trying to “sell” you anything. I am revealing the truths of our bountiful, powerful, abundant life giving forces.

Sadly the institutions have programmed everyone into a state of defense. Everyone has their guard up at all times. Everyone goes around tirelessly consuming, blaming, defending, fighting. This is not an intelligent or efficient use of my time. I challenge you all to do your own experiment instead. It is far more convincing, enlightening, perhaps even the best team challenge your family will have undertaken. What if you and your family decided to spend an entire growing season only eating from the farms.

The rules would require you to skip eating at all restaurants, no bar code or packaged food allowed. You would have to buy and prepare meals using only what you received from farmer’s that you knew. This includes – no oils from the store. You would cook using animal fats from the farms such as: pork lard, beef tallow, butter or ghee. If you know a farmer who raises olives like I do, you could even include their olive oil to dress your food. How hard can this be or what have you got to lose? You actually have everything to gain.

You can not include any grains or sugars unless you know the farmer who provided them to you. We were not meant to consume grains and sugar so skipping them is the best choice ever. You can not include any extra ingredients from the centralized food complex with the exception of real salt, organic black pepper and any organic seasoning that is not a blend. You need to use single seasonings so you can create your own blends and to avoid any extra ingredients that many seasoning companies add as fillers to the herbs and spice bottles to maintain shelf life. Fresh herbs are anyway the best to use in the growing season! I think that about covers it.

This will allow you to be able to experience what it actually costs to live like this if you follow this regimen for an entire growing season. In our area the growing season is from around May until October. You will need to ask your farmers what the growing season is in your neck of the woods. This customized test will be as honest and clean as you require it to be and there will be no way it can be wrong. It will meet your standards so it will be your truth.

By taking this challenge to test it all out yourself, you can experience what sort of side effect it might have on your overall health, if any. You can experience the joy, the smells, the tastes of things you have never enjoyed before and you might just expand in ways you never believed possible. You can look up recipes and try different meals and learn what your family actually likes and doesn’t. I would encourage you to try to prepare each component more than 4 different ways before you decide you are not a fan. For example, make the turnips 3-4 different ways. We have learned that we only enjoy turnips when we stew them into a dish and not really too much if they are prepared in some other fashion like roasted, grated into salads, sautéed into a dish – we just like them stewed. You may even hone cooking skills you did not previously have. The experience would be easier than living on an island like survivor playing mind games for 90 days! Haha! You might even find that you actually like cooking or better yet, that your children can take over some meal preparation duties because they like to cook and you love getting their help!

Niti lost her 4-year old daughter to cancer and that tragedy has turned her into a ninja for food integrity.  Can't wait until it comes out.

Based on Niti's benchmark here, where would  you put your eating habits on a scale of 1 to 10?  I'd put mine at about 7.  Always room for improvement, no?