Thanks for helping us grow this year by shopping the West Michigan Co-op. We had a great first year and helped local producers sell about $50,000 worth of food and other items. It's a huge first step towards building a sustainable local food system and you helped make it happen.
Please have a safe and happy holiday and come back and see us in 2008!
Gail Philbin
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Go Green for the Holidays!
Looking for unique "green" Christmas gift ideas this year? Consider giving (or asking Santa for) an annual membership to the West Michigan Co-op!! Annual fees are $35 to shop once a month at our year-round on-line farmers market! If you are interested please send your payment along with the name of the gift recipient and an email address to:
Tara Simmons
Media Rare
1111 Godfrey SW, Ste. S250
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
I will send an email invitation to join the WM Co-op to the gift recipient and mark that person as paid.
* Also available through the co-op are t-shirts for $20 and cloth shopping bags for $25, both with the West Michigan Co-op logo.
All gifts will also be available for purchase this Saturday December 15th between 1:30-4pm at Media Rare for the Member Pick-up.
Thanks and Happy Holidays!!! :)
Tara Simmons
Media Rare
1111 Godfrey SW, Ste. S250
Grand Rapids, MI 49503
I will send an email invitation to join the WM Co-op to the gift recipient and mark that person as paid.
* Also available through the co-op are t-shirts for $20 and cloth shopping bags for $25, both with the West Michigan Co-op logo.
All gifts will also be available for purchase this Saturday December 15th between 1:30-4pm at Media Rare for the Member Pick-up.
Thanks and Happy Holidays!!! :)
Monday, November 26, 2007
What goes into the making of a Butterball turkey
Gail sent this out to all the Co-op members today!:
It's hard to read the kind of story you'll see below, but it's important that we all know what goes into the making of those assembly line turkeys many people consume over the holidays. I thought I'd seen it all, but the things mentioned below take the cake. Another reason to eat humanely raised birds from small, local farms:
Comedian host of Real Time with Bill Maher has a piece printed on the popular Huffington Post site headed " George Bush: Pardon All the Turkeys." As a nod to Maher's "New Rules" segment on his weekly show, the piece opens with:
"New Rule: The president can't pardon just one or two turkeys this Thanksgiving. He's got to let them all go."
Maher notes the "torture" of turkeys and writes:
"Take a look at this video, shot just last month at a typical American turkey slaughterhouse, and this one, shot undercover last year at a Butterball slaughterhouse by investigators from PETA, and you'll see that my use of the word is no exaggeration. Butterball employees, taking a page out of the Abu Ghraib handbook, laughed while they kicked, punched, stomped, and even sexually assaulted turkeys."
He writes, "I ask you to do what I'm going to do and pardon a turkey this Thanksgiving. It's not hard. Just eat something else. Not someone else, because it doesn't seem fair to spare a turkey and roast a hunk of pig or cow instead." He questions ethics that would let us "bow our heads in gratitude for our families, our friends and our big screen TVs, and then carve into a creature who lived a miserable life and died a horrible death...."
And he asks Al Gore, "to stop gazing at his Oscar and his Nobel Prize long enough to read the United Nations report that calls the meat industry 'one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at very scale from local to global.'"
You can find the full article online here.
It's hard to read the kind of story you'll see below, but it's important that we all know what goes into the making of those assembly line turkeys many people consume over the holidays. I thought I'd seen it all, but the things mentioned below take the cake. Another reason to eat humanely raised birds from small, local farms:
Comedian host of Real Time with Bill Maher has a piece printed on the popular Huffington Post site headed " George Bush: Pardon All the Turkeys." As a nod to Maher's "New Rules" segment on his weekly show, the piece opens with:
"New Rule: The president can't pardon just one or two turkeys this Thanksgiving. He's got to let them all go."
Maher notes the "torture" of turkeys and writes:
"Take a look at this video, shot just last month at a typical American turkey slaughterhouse, and this one, shot undercover last year at a Butterball slaughterhouse by investigators from PETA, and you'll see that my use of the word is no exaggeration. Butterball employees, taking a page out of the Abu Ghraib handbook, laughed while they kicked, punched, stomped, and even sexually assaulted turkeys."
He writes, "I ask you to do what I'm going to do and pardon a turkey this Thanksgiving. It's not hard. Just eat something else. Not someone else, because it doesn't seem fair to spare a turkey and roast a hunk of pig or cow instead." He questions ethics that would let us "bow our heads in gratitude for our families, our friends and our big screen TVs, and then carve into a creature who lived a miserable life and died a horrible death...."
And he asks Al Gore, "to stop gazing at his Oscar and his Nobel Prize long enough to read the United Nations report that calls the meat industry 'one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at very scale from local to global.'"
You can find the full article online here.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Volunteering at the Co-op
During the last shopping round I was able to volunteer during the producer drop off day. Volunteering is a great way to meet the other people who belong to the co-op. The best part about volunteering is that you get to see all the food first hand!
Volunteers are needed every shopping cycle on drop-off and pick-up days. I had a lot of fun helping the producers unload their vehicles. It is a great way to meet the people who are making and delivering our food! After the food arrives, the volunteers go to work organizing all the food into the refrigerators and freezers. It is actually a lot of fun!!
The West Michigan Co-op could not exist without the help of volunteers! We are only needed 2 days a shopping cycle for only about 3 hours a shift! It is soooo easy!!!
On Producer Drop-off days volunteers are needed to help check in products from the producers and help to organize the products for the member pick-up day.
On Member Pick-up days volunteers are needed for a variety of tasks, including greeting members as they arrive, helping members find their correct orders, double check orders to help make sure everything is correct, and collect money at the check-out.
It is easy and fun!!! All you have to do to volunteer is contact Tara Simmons to sign up! See you there!!!
Ed. Note: As of today, if you log in and edit your Member Contact Info, you can now check the "I am available to volunteer" box. This will put you on a list to be contacted for volunteer opportunities. Thanks all!
Volunteers are needed every shopping cycle on drop-off and pick-up days. I had a lot of fun helping the producers unload their vehicles. It is a great way to meet the people who are making and delivering our food! After the food arrives, the volunteers go to work organizing all the food into the refrigerators and freezers. It is actually a lot of fun!!
The West Michigan Co-op could not exist without the help of volunteers! We are only needed 2 days a shopping cycle for only about 3 hours a shift! It is soooo easy!!!
On Producer Drop-off days volunteers are needed to help check in products from the producers and help to organize the products for the member pick-up day.
On Member Pick-up days volunteers are needed for a variety of tasks, including greeting members as they arrive, helping members find their correct orders, double check orders to help make sure everything is correct, and collect money at the check-out.
It is easy and fun!!! All you have to do to volunteer is contact Tara Simmons to sign up! See you there!!!
Ed. Note: As of today, if you log in and edit your Member Contact Info, you can now check the "I am available to volunteer" box. This will put you on a list to be contacted for volunteer opportunities. Thanks all!
Monday, October 29, 2007
Creswick Farm Tour
I was disappointed that I wasn't able to make it to the Creswick Farm Tour on October 20th, which wrapped up this years series of farm tours. Did anybody else out there go? How was it?
Luckily, I see that there is a summary of the whole Farm Tour series on their website.
What great pictures!
I can't wait for next year's farm tours! It's going to be a long winter!
Luckily, I see that there is a summary of the whole Farm Tour series on their website.
What great pictures!
I can't wait for next year's farm tours! It's going to be a long winter!
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Crane Dance Farm Tour
It's been a little over a week since I attended the first of many Local Farm Tours put together by Farms Without Harm.The tour was of Crane Dance Farm in Middleville. Crane Dance Farm is a sustainable, regenerative, pasture-based farm.
I haven't ate meat in many years, but I have been buying my eggs exclusively from the local farms, and mostly Crane Dance, for a couple years now. So even though they have beef cows, pigs, sheep, goats, and turkeys, I still wanted to go and see how a small organic, cruelty free farm is run, and where my eggs come from.
It's pretty much amazing. This farm is ran by 2 gals, Mary and Jill. They own the farm and live there and do most of the work all themselves. When they talk, you can tell that they believe animals deserve to live a happy and healthy life.
There are 2 sections to the farm. On one side of the road is the pigs, cows, sheeps, and goats. The other side is where all the poultry are kept.
The pigs are kept in a large fenced area outside and they have little shelters to get out of the sun and take naps. There are also lots of shade trees. These babies were running all over the place!
This was their mom in a mud pit.
The farmers, Mary and Jill, explained that in a normal farm setting these piglets would have had their tails cut off at birth and kept in gestation crates. They would be so stressed because they would not be able to do anything but stand up and sit down, that they would gnaw on each others tails due to stress. The adult pigs have their noses pierced to make it painful when they try to root into the ground, something that they love to do. The adults would have no room for walking either and would only be able to stand and sit all day long for their entire life.
Then we saw some really cute cows.
This hairy one's name was chewbacca :)
You can see from this picture that these cows have lots of room to roam.
This is where the sheep and goats are kept.
Then we crossed back across the street to see the birds.
First up was the turkey house.
These turkeys come and go inside their house, but there is an electric fence around them to keep predators out. They are locked up at night to keep them safe from owls.
Here are some of the chickens:
The eggs you get from these guys are not only brown and white, but some are greenish/blue, some are grey, some are speckled. It's because of the genetic diversity of the chickens. And let me tell you, you have not had an egg until you have tried one of these. They are delicious. The flavor is so much more intense than any store bought egg. Ask anyone who has ate my cupcakes or cakes! :) They make your baking taste awesome!
They also have ducks. I bought some duck eggs, but was a little leary of how I was going to cook them and how they would taste. On Saturday morning I woke up to the aroma of breakfast and got up to find that my husband made french toast with them. It was delicious.
It is important to not be fooled by grocery store free-range eggs, like I was for years. The US Government will let an egg producer label their eggs free-range if the chickens are not kept in battery cages. This DOES NOT mean they are outside basking in the sunshine (like the picture you see above). Often times, these chickens are still crammed inside warehouses with very little room to move around in, they still have their beaks cut off, and they are still very unhappy and treated inhumanely.
After the tour Marie Catrib's gave everyone chorizo hash that they made on site along with some local tomatoes and local cheese from Steve-N-Sons Grassfields Cheese located in Coopersville.
If you would like to sign up for the farm tours, visit Farms Without Harm. The next tour will be on September 22 in Montcalm County at Heritage Acres, an 80-acre Mennonite farm who uses sustainable practices to raise a variety of animals and crops.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Your browser is...
Hi all!
This isn't a typical coop-related post, but I'm "the tech guy," so I thought I'd geek out for a moment and get you all up-to-date on what your computer is running.
Lots of you out there are Windows users - in fact, if you follow the statistics, 19 out of 20 of you use Windows rather than an alternative like Mac OS X, or Linux. It's a Windows world out there. It's likely the vast majority of you are Internet Explorer ("IE") users as well, because it comes with Windows, and it's made by Microsoft. If you're not particularly keen on running your updates, you may even still be using IE version 6 - if you don't know, go to the Help menu, and choose "About Internet Explorer."
If you are using version 6, and you're on Windows XP, before you read anything else, at least update to version 7. Run Microsoft Update, and just let your computer get download-happy for a while. Trust me, IE 7 is important - it's much more secure (leading to fewer viruses), and as a bonus, it renders pages better as well. While you're there, just tell your computer to auto-install updates. If it's online all day, it needs them to stay secure, and to prevent nasties from crawling onto your hard drive.
That said, I don't really believe that IE is the best browser out there. Version 7 is much better than 6, but it still pales, in my opinion, in comparison to the (free!) alternatives. Those alternatives are:
Firefox (www.getfirefox.com)
Safari (www.apple.com/safari)
Opera (www.opera.com)
Firefox is a free, open source browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Free as in costing nothing but the time to download. Open Source, meaning not only can you install and run the program, but you can also download, edit, and modify the code that creates the program - with the stipulation that you give your changes back to the community. I'm guessing that almost nobody reading this blog really wants to do that, but it's good to know that there's a worldwide community of people maintaining this program, not because they make money at it, but because they use it.
Safari is a free browser from Apple. Today they announced that the new version (Safari 3.0) will be available for Windows as well as OS X - and there's a 'beta' version of the program available for free download. It's not particularly stable, so I wouldn't recommend it as your main internet program just yet. But it's exciting that there's more competition out there. Safari, like Firefox, has an open-source core which handles the rendering of the pages - in fact, the main core of the browser comes from the KDE project on Linux. But unlike Firefox, the program is not entirely open source, so only the core can actually be tinkered with.
Opera is another browser that's been out for a while. They have a paid version, and a free version, but in the free version you have to put up with ads. I don't really like it that much, but it has a good size following, and there's lots of work being done on it - in fact, Opera's software is in many mobile phones, as well as the Nintendo Wii's internet browser.
These alternative all have a little different feel, but they all have the same advantages: they render pages faster than IE, and because they aren't directly tied into your system files, they are far more secure. They still have issues - there are security patches for each of these browsers on a regular basis - but a security issue in Firefox will generally only hurt Firefox, while a security flaw in IE can more often than not do damage to Windows itself!
As a web designer, it's also far easier to develop a web page for any of these other browsers, because they closely follow the World Wide Web Consortium's standards for web page rendering - essentially, they show pages as they are meant to be shown. IE has several 'quirks' in it's display (though IE 7 fixed quite a few of them), so as a designer, I have to make lots of exceptions and code changes - which ultimately slow down the site, so it can play nicely with all the browsers.
So hey, give one of these alternatives a try; see if you like them. I personally use Firefox on my PC and my Mac. It's got some great features and extensions, and it's very snappy showing pages.
-Your Tech Guy
This isn't a typical coop-related post, but I'm "the tech guy," so I thought I'd geek out for a moment and get you all up-to-date on what your computer is running.
Lots of you out there are Windows users - in fact, if you follow the statistics, 19 out of 20 of you use Windows rather than an alternative like Mac OS X, or Linux. It's a Windows world out there. It's likely the vast majority of you are Internet Explorer ("IE") users as well, because it comes with Windows, and it's made by Microsoft. If you're not particularly keen on running your updates, you may even still be using IE version 6 - if you don't know, go to the Help menu, and choose "About Internet Explorer."
If you are using version 6, and you're on Windows XP, before you read anything else, at least update to version 7. Run Microsoft Update, and just let your computer get download-happy for a while. Trust me, IE 7 is important - it's much more secure (leading to fewer viruses), and as a bonus, it renders pages better as well. While you're there, just tell your computer to auto-install updates. If it's online all day, it needs them to stay secure, and to prevent nasties from crawling onto your hard drive.
That said, I don't really believe that IE is the best browser out there. Version 7 is much better than 6, but it still pales, in my opinion, in comparison to the (free!) alternatives. Those alternatives are:
Firefox (www.getfirefox.com)
Safari (www.apple.com/safari)
Opera (www.opera.com)
Firefox is a free, open source browser from the Mozilla Foundation. Free as in costing nothing but the time to download. Open Source, meaning not only can you install and run the program, but you can also download, edit, and modify the code that creates the program - with the stipulation that you give your changes back to the community. I'm guessing that almost nobody reading this blog really wants to do that, but it's good to know that there's a worldwide community of people maintaining this program, not because they make money at it, but because they use it.
Safari is a free browser from Apple. Today they announced that the new version (Safari 3.0) will be available for Windows as well as OS X - and there's a 'beta' version of the program available for free download. It's not particularly stable, so I wouldn't recommend it as your main internet program just yet. But it's exciting that there's more competition out there. Safari, like Firefox, has an open-source core which handles the rendering of the pages - in fact, the main core of the browser comes from the KDE project on Linux. But unlike Firefox, the program is not entirely open source, so only the core can actually be tinkered with.
Opera is another browser that's been out for a while. They have a paid version, and a free version, but in the free version you have to put up with ads. I don't really like it that much, but it has a good size following, and there's lots of work being done on it - in fact, Opera's software is in many mobile phones, as well as the Nintendo Wii's internet browser.
These alternative all have a little different feel, but they all have the same advantages: they render pages faster than IE, and because they aren't directly tied into your system files, they are far more secure. They still have issues - there are security patches for each of these browsers on a regular basis - but a security issue in Firefox will generally only hurt Firefox, while a security flaw in IE can more often than not do damage to Windows itself!
As a web designer, it's also far easier to develop a web page for any of these other browsers, because they closely follow the World Wide Web Consortium's standards for web page rendering - essentially, they show pages as they are meant to be shown. IE has several 'quirks' in it's display (though IE 7 fixed quite a few of them), so as a designer, I have to make lots of exceptions and code changes - which ultimately slow down the site, so it can play nicely with all the browsers.
So hey, give one of these alternatives a try; see if you like them. I personally use Firefox on my PC and my Mac. It's got some great features and extensions, and it's very snappy showing pages.
-Your Tech Guy
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