Lapin Fermier, anyone?

In France, people don't freak out about their meat. Check out this meat case I encountered in the South of France at the Saint Rémy-de-Provence Market last year. It's refreshing to see meat resembling the animal from which they came. Yes, eyeballs and all. Yes, and the bit of feather resemling a mohawk they left on the chicken.

Now before you think ewwww... this is how we get our meat in the US.

I don't know about you, but I'll take eyeballs and feathers (things that belong) over styrfoam and plastic wrap. True, eyeballs and feathers are gross, but consider the advantages of seeing your meat in its "natural" form. No one can sell you a diseased chicken with stuff like

-- Tumors all over its body that the antibiotics couldn't fix
-- Missing eyeballs from the raging infectious diseases inside the CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) it's lived in all its life
-- No feathers left on its head because it was pecked off by its chicken neighbor crammed in the inhumanely small cage next door

I'm not trying to be sensational here. We have a law in this country that a cow can only be slaughtered for human consumption if it can walk into the slaughter house under its own power. It's not hard to imagine why that law is needed to protect us from the worst of factory animal farming.

But if we were to buy more of our meat in its natural state, no one would be able to sell a diseased chicken to you because you'd wonder: Why does that chicken only have one eyeball? Why does it have no feathers left on the head? Once people start asking questions like that, maybe the big corporate poultry farms will have to do better because they can no longer offload mistreated animals in neat little styrofoam packages.

We all live in this imperfect food system and it's not going to change overnight. I believe we have the power to move it in a positive direction, and the first step is to connect more honestly with our food. I started by local whenever possible believing that the positive impact of my actions, however small, will nudge our giant food industral complex in the right direction.