Does love scale?
We’ve been chatting nourishment this week (in the Monday Matriarch Meditations) and of course food is a major component of nourishment.
Get the Monday Matriarch Mediations, weekly devotions for Wise Women.
I start every day with a high protein breakfast.
Even if I’m craving carbs, I have a matcha latte with raw milk and (sometimes a raw egg) and a little maple syrup, first.
**I have a Jersey cow and she also eats a high protein diet so that she produces high protein, high fat milk! (Jersey milk contains 18% more protein, 20% more calcium and 25% more butterfat than average (a butterfat level up to about 6.8%!!!)
Then I follow that up with some sort of beef or pork or a mix and some eggs!
If I’m still craving something or have a lot of physical work to do, I’ll eat oatmeal or a piece of sourdough or gluten free toast after that.
People REALLY underestimate how much food, particularly protein they need first thing.
Wise Women need to fuel themselves AND their families with food that doesn’t cause major blood sugar spikes.
Your mood and your children’s moods are a result of that first meal, so get nourished!
Speaking of nourishment, HOW nourishing an animal is to us depends on how it was both RAISED and KILLED.
More on that below-
A few weeks ago my beloved teammate and husband, Jeremiah, attended a cow butchering workshop to help us learn the necessary skills to process our own cows.
In raising animals for meat for the past ten years (we started with meat rabbits and a turkey and gradually worked our way up), we have come to strongly believe that the most loving approach to raising animals for food is to NOT just provide them with dignity, love and respect throughout the course of their life, but in their death as well.
More on that in a bit.
Back to the cows.
In June 2022 we purchased our first ever beef cows!
Crazy to think we have COWS.
In fact now we have six!
Four beef and my beloved dairy cow, Email.
I’ve only had cows for 8 months but I’m already positive that I’m a “cow person.”
Not a goat person, possibly a sheep person, kind of a pig person, but DEFINITELY a cow person.
Their style of living (they are EXPERTS at nourishment!!) and their animal husbandry needs just work for me.
They don’t toil or spin, they graze and chew the cud**(join the Chat thread in the Substack app to learn about why this matters) and rest.
I love their faces, their bodies, their beautiful black noses and trusting eyes, their phenomenally beautiful hides, obsession with mowing my grass and their napping policies.
I love what they do for the soil, the environment, for my health and my mood.
It’s difficult to remain in a bad mood when a dairy cow is licking your hair to cheer you up, or because she thinks your hair looks like hay, hey!
I love them so much that I want to give them the best quality life.
I want to be there when it’s time for them to leave this earth and become nourishment for me and my family.
I have zero interest in loading them into a metal trailer to transport them for over an hour to a place they have never been to have strangers prod and poke at them to get them into strange (technically clean but dingy looking) metal shoot to be in panic and fear through the last few moments of their life.
I understand why meat processors exist.
In today’s world, it’s not feasible for everyone who eats meat to raise their own cow-although its more possible than you think-we should talk about that!
And I don’t want to discourage people from eating the precious animal protein they need to have strong bones, muscles, metabolisms, and minds because it comes from a processor.
But farmers relying upon meat processing plants is a requirement when they scale and sell to the public and there’s a compromise that occurs when we scale.
Whether its agriculture, medicine or education, we lose individual connection, closeness, trust and often love-nourishment, if you will, when we make things bigger.
We have to!
When things become bigger the distance between beings becomes greater and leaves room for automated and less emotional interactions.
The need for protocols and regulations increases while attention to individual needs and connection on every level decreases.
It’s simply impossible to have as deep connection when you’re working through 100 animals, 400 patients, or 30+ students a day.
Sure there are humans in the world with “big hearts” but the majority of us can only afford to care about the things and people that truly matter to us, the ones we have grown to know and love.
To expect a different teacher every year to care about and pay attention to the individual needs of our children to the degree that we who made them do, is unrealistic.
To expect a doctor that sees 400 faces a week to remember our individualized stories, needs, hurts and history is unfair.
And to expect a processing plant employee to care about my cows and know their idiosyncrasies, lead them out to a green field to eat their last meal in their favorite place and leave their body peacefully without stress, is just not happening.
In life, close connections are not always necessary for the desired outcome.
If you need someone to set your broken leg, maybe it’s not important that the ER doctor knew your daddy and your granddaddy and attends the same church as you.
If you’re studying organic chemistry (as I did) it’s ok to sit in a large auditorium with 200 other students in front of a professor who you will likely never have a conversation with, in order to get a passing grade and a grasp of carbon molecules.
And if you’re just looking for “food” that has the calories you need to be satiated, then there are instances where how the animal lived or died may or may not matter to you.
That’s the beauty of modern life.
We have choices.
I get to choose what’s important to me and you get to choose what’s important to you.
For good or for bad, we don’t all need to raise (or hunt) our own animals in order to eat anymore.
We have a choice, to live in a place where we can do that, to purchase from a farmer that does it for us or to go to a grocery store that purchases from loads of farmers that do it for them.
And if and when we choose to do it ourselves, we get to decide which parts of the animal husbandry and food harvesting process matter most to us.
For me, I am choosing (and have been choosing) to give my animals a particular kind of life that in order to be fully physically and energetically nourishing, must end with a particular kind of death.
In my experience, it’s just too difficult to control ensure the quality of life experience I desire for them, for my creatures entrusted to me, for the food that will nourish me without having my finger on the pulse of every step of the process, including their death.
If I grow them in a small system and then funnel them into a larger one to end their days, that feels incongruous with the past 18 months and what I purport to be about.
I think the questions we need to be asking ourselves these days is can “big” still be good quality and if not, can large scale operations truly nourish a person, animal or community they eat it needs it and does that matter to you?
We’ve heard of systems being “too big to fail”, but are we talking about systems that are “too big to care”, “too big to love”, or “too big to be of good quality?”
We all have to make choices and maybe we can’t all be our own doctors, educators and food producers, but that doesn't make us any less effected when these large systems offer us an inferior product or service.
We, the consumers are left wanton, and often not even knowing it.
When these systems fail to heal, educate and nourish us, do we make the connection?
Do we even consider that the problem is in the size of communities, companies and food systems?
Or did the scaling happen so gradually that we no longer know to question it?
The current set up was handed to us by our parents and their parents before them and now do we just accept that food lacks nutrition, doctors lack empathy and knowledge and schools lack the ability to educate?
Do we settle for supplements instead of a system tear-down?
My hope is that enough of us begin to take a harder look at these systems and being to opt out, let the “too big to fail” amoebas of commerce dwindle and eventually become obsolete.
Covid introduced over a million new homeschoolers to the world, with my state of North Carolina doubling the number of homeschools in 2021.
If the number of homesteading accounts on IG or YouTube are any indication, I’d say more and more people appear to be leaving conventional food systems and we know that over 200,000 healthcare workers left their industry last year.
The scale is tipping in favor of love, nourishment and connection and I pray it continues.
And even if we don’t abolish all large scale operations, after all there are people that require traditional schooling options for their kids, grocery stores and there is a place for ER medicine, I pray these shifts towards love and connection pressures the systems to start changing their ways and offering BETTER to the folks they provide for.
Our neighboring farmers tell us that we are crazy to bother to learn to process a 1500lb animal ourselves when the meat processors do it so cheaply, but they don’t know is that we aren’t just feeding ourselves over here, we are nourishing an ecosystem and it will be a labor of love.
xoxo,
Sarah
Please leave your thoughts in the comments and don’t forget to he’s don over to the CHAT to learn about why chewing cud is SOOOOO important for you as a Wise Women. Gosh God uses nature to show us so many obvious things that we manage to miss daily!
If you value you my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and or share this post.