Good on you! And I totally concur.
I would add and elaborate that right now the real costs are not reflected in much of what we buy at a supermarket. Cheap fossil fuel energy has distorted and masked the real costs of doing things, in this case producing and distributing food. (Misplaced government subsidies on commodities don't help either.) I think many people are becoming more aware though of the real costs of these things. For example, I had someone express surprise that I occasionally cooked food to feed to the chickens. The idea being that it was wasteful to use propane energy just to make chicken feed. But the feed in question was sweetpotatoes or squash grown on my own farm using zero fossil fuels to cultivate or harvest, and the transportation costs were only the muscle energy it took to carry the produce the hundred feet from the field to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the chicken coop. Compare that to the feed mix one buys from the feed store, where the energy costs include (mainly in non-renewable fossil fuels) those from growing grains and soy on a mechanized farm, milling and processing, creating and mixing ingredients by machine, packaging and shipping thousands of miles, and driving to town and back to buy the stuff. And that's just looking at energy costs, to say nothing of environmental impact or anything else. Am I really gonna beat myself up about using a little propane to make my home-made feed? Give me a break! I know, it seems silly when you put it like that, but the truth behind this is that people, however well-meaning, aren't used to thinking about things this way. We take this all relatively cheap, non-local food for granted as if it were normal. Although I think the realities behind this distortion are becoming increasingly evident to people and will become more so in the near future as oil dwindles. Besides, grocery food is only cheap when measured by price point in dollars and cents right there at the check-out counter, and not counting such related things as environmental degradation, tax money, and future health care bills as "costs." Might as well start rethinking things now, I figure.
Very true Sky! I know I've had numerous discussions with Vegans and Vegetarians who don't like it that I raise "meat" animals. Then sit there talking to me about how they don't believe in harming other living things, while living in the urban/concrete jungles and having their dietary favs shipped half-way around the world or at least across the continent to their sterilized supermarkets, so that they can feel they aren't "harming" anything. One even said they don't "see bugs" in their city. I told them that was probably due to their taxes paying for their city to spray the unwanted life-forms out of existence! They didn't like being reminded that concrete isn't "natural" and that their sterile urban world does more to harm the environment than my small farmstead. Crazy how people don't recognize their participation in life's circle. They think they are "above" it.