Selling meat requires USDA inspection, both of the animals and the facility where they’re processed.

There’s an exemption to this requirement if instead of cuts of meat you’re selling live animals. In that case, you can custom slaughter for the buyer under state regs instead of federal ones.

The live animals slaughtered under this exemption aren’t inspected, but the processing plants are. I’m not sure why. Perhaps if you own the animal, you are presumed to know whether it’s healthy, so the state just concerns itself with sanitary handling procedures.

Custom slaughter has at least one major advantage — it can happen on the farm.

This is less stressful for the animals, which don’t have to be trucked long distances. It conserves resources such as time, fuel, and money that would spent on getting animals those distances. It keeps offal on the farm for composting, which contributes to the farm’s fertility without requiring external inputs. And it produces higher quality meat.

But selling a live animal means selling the whole animal. Buyers can share it, but this generally means each person gets a substantial amount of meat all at once. And most buyers don’t have freezer space for a side of beef.

That’s why we participate in a meat CSA, from the same farm where we’re getting our heirloom turkeys. A CSA is a community supported agriculture program where the members pay in advance for a share of the harvest. By buying steers and hogs on the hoof, we get meat from animals that die on the land where they’re raised. And by buying collectively with more people and arranging multiple deliveries, we get manageable amounts of meat for our freezers.

So what does that have to do with reading? Well, by way of a couple of my favorite blogs, I’ve discovered this farm blog (you should know before you follow that link that there are lots of pictures of hog carcasses). The farm raises hogs with care through their whole life cycle.

If I wasn’t already in for a quarter of a hog through our CSA, I’d be looking to find friends who wanted to share some pork.

From a hilarious mommy blog I just started reading:

I don’t want to sound like some sort of Alfie Kohn acolyte, but Nora and I spent some time at a busy playground recently and some parents really need to cool it on the “good jobs.” Good job swinging! Good job going down the slide! Good job, inertia! Good job, gravity! Then Nora and I went to lunch where I overheard a kid get good-jobbed for drinking all of his chocolate milk. What kid needs to be self-esteemed into finishing chocolate milk? Good job, sugar! Way to taste delicious!

Praise, especially of this verbal-tic variety, spins me up. mimi smartypants perfectly captures its ridiculousness.

photo: Amy Smith

I spent the day in the library. My own library.

We moved into our house six months ago and it has taken that long to get our bookshelves, have them painted, and install them. Today we unpacked all 47 boxes of books that have been sitting since we arrived. They were moved mostly by my friend Eriq and others willing to bear our burdens when we weren’t wise enough to hire help to get us into our new place.

The lovely photo to the left hangs in our library. Along with the banner image and most of the other photos on this site, it was taken by my friend and fellow Queen Anne mom Amy Smith.

Today is a day of gratitude for bookish friends — those who help move 47 boxes of them, and those who allow the use of their glorious images of them.

Hurray for books. And hurray for friends.

Referencing an old post at Idle Words, the Law for Food blogger discusses pasteurization and the American school lunch.

While I also take issue with pasteurization, the part that most interests me is his point that what we provide in the lunchroom is as much a part of how we educate our kids as what we provide in the classroom.

As I consider the options for our daughter’s education, home school is looking more attractive all the time. While there are a host of reasons, two of the most important for me have nothing to do with curriculum. They are: how we sleep and what we eat.

I’ve been suffering from sleep deprivation this week. And I do mean suffering. When I don’t get enough sleep I feel muddled, enraged, and nauseated.

A recent New York magazine feature addresses some of the physical, intellectual, and emotional burdens kids bear when they aren’t getting enough sleep, most of which apply just as much to adults as children.

Our whole family functions better when we’re sleeping well, so it’s a priority for me to get back to our predictable and plentiful sleep schedule.

So with that, I’ll say “good night.”

[Edited to add: Good golly, I must have been too tired to notice that I didn’t actually publish this after writing it. This really was a November 8 post. Really.]

Choosing traditional foods is part of the recent trend toward eating what the Ethicurean calls SOLE food — Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical.

Traditional foods include heritage breeds of livestock that are better suited to being raised the old-fashioned way (in open air, on pasture, eating foods appropriate to the species) than the ones bred for industrial conditions.

The NY Times today includes an article on preserving traditional turkey breeds.

We’re picking up our own heritage turkeys this weekend. Yes, that’s plural. We’re getting two because the birds turned out to be smaller than expected. This is the first year our farmer has raised heritage birds, and after losing the first round of poults to predators, they didn’t have enough time to raise these slow-to-mature varieties to their full size.

With 9 adults and 2 kids here for Thanksgiving, the two 6 lb birds we’re getting still may not be enough. I’m excited about trying them, though. And a little apprehensive, since I usually don’t serve things to guests that I’ve never made before.

Preparing heritage birds is different from the standard butterball not only because they’re smaller, but also because they’re leaner and have a more balanced ratio of white to dark meat.

Local Harvest suggests that they should be cooked faster and hotter than most birds bound for the Thanksgiving table. After searching for tips on preparing heritage birds, here’s the most promising recipe I’ve found: D’artagnan’s Roasted Wild/Heritage Turkey

Last night, as I went to bed I thought, “Tomorrow I will read something inspiring.”

This afternoon I picked up the current issue of Mothering, and found an article about a mother-daughter book club. Reading it, I felt moved and misty eyed.

These six girls and their moms call themselves the Page Turners. They have been meeting for 11 years, reading books the girls choose and holding discussions the girls lead.

Each meeting, the host selects the book, prepares a meal, plans an activity, and adds pages to the group’s scrapbook. The meetings can last for hours. The meal provides a center point for the meeting, and relates thematically to the book. The books fall across the girls’ broad range of interests and have prompted thoughtful exploration of new ideas through conversations and activities. The activities have included learning new skills and crafts, playing games, and planning outings. The scrapbook records each of these aspects of the club.

Earlier, I wrote about building an attachment village, and wondered what worked for other families. This is precisely the sort of conscious community building that I hoped to learn about.

As much as she loves reading, at two and a half, my daughter is too young to be interested in a book club. But I hope it won’t be long before she’ll find this idea as inspiring as I do. And then we’ll be looking for other mother daughter pairs.

In a couple of recent essays, not reading absorbs a literature professor and a men’s magazine writer.

The academic ponders discussing books he hasn’t read to make a point about the canon: there shouldn’t be one. He suggests that trying to meet the standards of high culture makes us inauthentic.

The hack wonders if not reading Harry Potter means he’ll find himself living in a world he doesn’t understand when the Potter-obsessed masses grow up. He suggests that not participating in pop culture makes us irrelevant.

I cringed while reading both writers (the professor only second hand, since I don’t know French). There’s just too much swagger: I don’t need to read what’s important in my social setting because I’m already so erudite/hip.

How they say it irks me, but what they say interests me: What we value individually is more worthwhile than what everyone else thinks we should value.

I’d be more interested if they’d tell me what they are reading, instead of what they’re not.

The idea that life is hard and I should prepare my child for that disturbs me. Adopting that philosophy would be like telling her, “The world will treat you poorly; let me be the first.”

I prefer peaceful parenting. Which sounds self-righteous, and today — nearly ridiculous. Today I used force to keep my daughter from deliberately stepping into the street, from grabbing every breakable object in a store, and from opening a bathroom stall door while I was still seated. Which seems reasonable. Except that we both became more enraged with every intervention.

Today was not a peaceful day.

I treated her with force, and she reacted with anger. Well, duh. I don’t want to be forced to do things either.

Those weren’t surprising situations. Each one of them has occurred before, enough — I kept thinking — for her to know better. But why did I expect that doing the same thing in the same situation would get a different reaction? Why should she be the one to behave differently?

Instead of yanking her around after the fact, I could have prevented each of those situations by addressing them in advance in a gentle way. It could have been a fun day at the farmers’ market, and the furniture showroom, and the restaurant. We could have played.

That’s what I strive for — days that are delightful.

Scott Noelle wrote in a recent “Daily Groove” email that rejecting “authoritarian, coercive parenting in favor of non-punitive, pleasure-oriented parenting” will attract criticism from folks who believe that kids need to be prepared for a cold, cruel world.

He suggests that we should think of the frog, which will jump out if placed in boiling water, but will stay in the pot if it starts in cool water that’s brought to boiling. “The slow boil seems more humane, but that ‘well-adjusted’ frog eventually *died* from the heat! Whereas the non-adjusted frog’s intact sensitivity protected it from being boiled.”

I don’t want to prepare my girl to endure a difficult life, I want to prepare her to make a joyful one.

Every tribal newspaper I’ve ever read (and I used to read them frequently when I was practicing law in tribal courts) has included one or more articles on diabetes. Native people are disproportionately impacted by the disease, and an article in the most recent issue of the University of Washington’s alumni magazine, Columns, suggests that it may be because of the diet of commodity food introduced with the reservation system:

Native Americans may be particularly vulnerable to diabetes because their exposure to these foods is still so recent (they may be particularly susceptible to alcoholism for the same reason)

The same explanation — that wheat is a relatively recent addition to the human diet, and not everyone can digest it well — is often offered for the existence of celiac disease, the intolerance for gluten that can have debilitating medical consequences. Gluten-free Girl Shauna says that 1% of Americans have celiac, and most don’t know it. (read this: Do you have celiac?)

So here’s my question: Is celiac more common among Native people? I would imagine that it is, and that it is dramatically under-diagnosed.