Sorry, one more soapbox...food supplies

"I think the revelations have no doubt been alarming," said Gibbs. That a company which found salmonella in its own testing would continue to ship products "is beyond disturbing for millions of parents," he added.

FDA officials said they last inspected the Blakely facility in 2001, when it wasn't being used to make peanut butter.

It did not get much attention from the federal government again until earlier this year, when a shipment of peanuts from the plant was returned from Canada because it was contaminated with metal fragments. The FDA then asked Georgia authorities to inspect.

But the state inspections did not detect what FDA officials say was a salmonella problem at the plant dating back to at least June of 2007.

This is our food system here. Not just for one state, but for the whole of the US and Canada...and who knows where else any individual company ships to. They inspect these things how often? The salmonella problem dates back over a year? I mean, the plant wasn't even processing peanut butter at the time of its last inspection, and when it changed to processing PB no one thought to maybe put some kind of inspection into gear? And it shipped off products out of the country (as if location even matters) containing metal fragments, gets rejected by someone on the ball, and still no one pays much attention?

Yeah, I'm just itchin' to go to the grocery store more and more these days.

Nothing is safe. Not human food, not stock feed, not pet foods.

We have to get to the gardening full force this year on this homestead. Come hell or high water, this garden has to produce for us. It's what we are going to eat, plain and simple. If it doesn't do well and I can't find a suitable supply from someone we can put some trust in, we just aren't going to be eating it.

It's easier to go to the store when I need something, I'll grant you that, but is it worth our health and safety? Not hardly.

We need to get into a better habit of eating anyway, and the time isn't going to get any better to start. I don't have it all laid out, in terms of where everything would come from and such -- we don't grow our own grains here for flour and such, for example -- but I have some supply lines in place for a great deal of things...a trusted butcher who buys meat locally from trusted farms, until we have beef or other meat ourselves; a farm market with locally grown fruits and vegetables in season; an Amish community that sells to folks once in a while. I can work with that and just make changes to our diet. Honestly, we need to eat far more in-season fruits and vegetables anyway.

Which one of those homesteader books is it where they ate what was in season, fresh, and when that season was finished, they turned to other things? I totally can't think of their names -- a husband and wife couple, somewhere up in the New England states. Is it the Nearings? Anyway, they were way more 'raw' than I suppose I'll ever get this family to go with, but still...eating fresh during the growing season, and relying only on home-canned produce we can trace from soil to jar out of season.

I need to hone some more skills...pasta making is a big one for us. It's not difficult at all to do various pastas, like egg noodles, ravioli, tortellini, spaghetti and such. I'm just not set up for anything like elbow macaroni. I can bake breads of all kinds, and I need to work on finding a good way to make tortillas. We can grow a whole host of beans for drying, eating fresh, etc. Chickens for meat right now, and Dewey would like to get set up for a beef calf here. Hogs I can do without, thank you very much. Goats would be easier to raise here compared to a Jersey or other milker, even rabbits for meat.

More and more, with the recalls ever-growing in every direction, you just have to get prepared to live off what you can grow and raise yourself. Community would be so much better, but we don't have that here really. It's Abundant Blessings Homestead or nothing :o)