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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Healthy eating, Paleo style, on the road!

Here are the hands of your own PaleoJay, cradling the sumptuous supper of lamb, sweet potatoes, zucchini and sausage at the Trempealeau Hotel in the small Mississippi river town of Trempealeau, Wisconsin!  The menu was replete with shrimp, steaks, salads etc., all ready for a traveling Paleo person to have a tasty meal packed with nutrition!

It seems that there are still many places to go where good, ancestral types of food are readily available.  Just as in buying our food, the very best quality food is available from small, independent restaurants; places where great pride is still taken in excellence of ingredients, and in careful preparation- quite the opposite of the big "Chains" that are all about cutting corners, using the cheapest ingredients to maximize profits, and spending most of their extra money on advertising to seduce you into patronizing them.  

The Trempealeau Hotel is one of these small eating places of excellence.  If you are passing by La Crosse on I90, it is well worth your while to get off at hwy 157 in Onalaska and head north to the Trempealeau sign, and then west to the Hotel!  You will even pass within a mile of the fabled home of yours truly...  be sure to wave!

My point, besides being a brief travelogue, is that of bypassing what has become the degraded nature of  the Mass American diet and culture of today, and seeking out those places that are more like what our culture embraced 50 and more years ago.  Small independent restaurants, small and independent farmers- this is where we need to be spending our dollars!  Not on fast/crappy food, or big/crappy chains, but to those who have traditional or ancestral values of quality.

I believe one of the most important figures today in a sustainable farming model of excellence is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms.  A working farmer, Joel is also an excellent speaker, and a convincing role model for traditional agriculture.  Joel's most recent book, Confessions of a Lunatic Farmer, is must reading for any modern person seeking health and sanity in our crazy modern world!
He shows a real, viable alternative to the failing Big Agribusiness model prevalent today...

Bottom line:  Caring about your health, and the health of the land beneath your feet, and the animals and plants under your care, is the essence of Good Stewardship, and is really what we were created to accomplish.  To quote John Wesley, founder of the Methodist movement:


Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.” 

I think Polyface farms is following that tradition.

J
J, Phil and Holly at our last nursing home "gig"

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