Where does your food come from?

caseydog

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MG has been asking for new food didscussions, and this just came to mind.

Where does you food come from.

Being a year-round business these days, food has to come from all over the world to get anything you want in any season (not necessarily a good thing). But, if you go with nature's flow to some degree, there are areas all of us get food from, normally.

In the US, Almost all of our meat comes from the US. It just works out that we have a region or climate zone right for just about every major food animal. Here in Texas, we raise a lot of beef, while dairy cattle are more to the Northern states. The Midwest is abundant with hogs and chickens.

California is produce heaven. Leafy greens, berries, herbs and spices are all big in Cali. Grains, including sweet corns (the stuff humans eat) dominate the midwest.

Fruit trees are also predominately Northwest of Northeast, with the exception of citrus, which is big South Florida and South Texas.

Now, during the winter months, a lot of the harvesting moves South, into Central and South America.

Seafood is the real fly in the soup. You have to really read the fine print. In an effort to cut costs, a lot of seafood comes from China/Southeast Asia. It is often raised in polluted water with little or no health regulations in place.

So, I am curious, in places like Europe, what countries or regions produce your meats and produce?

Foods you buy "out of season," where does it come from?

This is purely curiosity -- I honestly don't know.

CD
 
Fun question! In Ohio, we have pigs. Lots and lots of pigs. We also have some beef and dairy cattle, but generally not big huge operations.

Go to the county fair, there'll be all the usual barnyard critters, but pigs will reign. We love our pigs.

On the veggie side, two crops are co-king; corn and soybeans.

On our grapes, I see that a lot come from Mexico and Chile. I just opened some strawberries from Peru. Generally, I don't really pay attention, but I probably will for the next few weeks, just for fun.
 
Being in nz we are a bit isolated so we pretty much need to grow year round, in the far north it's called the winter less north stuff grows all round. We import bananas and other fruit from Ecuador etc. coconuts from the islands. Being an export country we have sheep cattle and chickens available year round as well! I think from memory we exported 9billion $ worth of meat last year.

Russ
 
In the US, Almost all of our meat comes from the US. It just works out that we have a region or climate zone right for just about every major food animal. Here in Texas, we raise a lot of beef, while dairy cattle are more to the Northern states. The Midwest is abundant with hogs and chickens.

Yes - but lamb is not so common?
So, I am curious, in places like Europe, what countries or regions produce your meats and produce?

A lot of meat eaten here (most?) is UK produced and there is increasing bias towards sourcing that. We produce beef, pork, lamb & chicken of great quality and also game. There are high welfare standards here which means that we only source meat raised from outside the UK if it meets that welfare standard.

When it comes to vegetables/salad etc. we get many things from elsewhere Europe, which either cannot be grown fresh here or are out of season. This may change now that Brexit has come! We will see...

Good topic caseydog. :okay:

I should add I am only talking about fresh produce in the above post.
 
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Bacon here has been a bone of contention, bacon from Canada has had a bad wrap lately, I know a lady who works for a nz company that sell pork products, she says it's hard selling against price, imported stuff is way cheaper. The peta people are also putting pressure on caged pigs, it's getting quite contentious. We buy free range eggs and try to buy meat that is "looked after"

Russ
 
Yes - but lamb is not so common?
True - as a whole, Americans eat very little lamb. I posted about it on here before. There was even an article in US News & Business Report (or maybe Forbes) about how over half of Americans have not even tried lamb. Let that sink in...
 
Yes - but lamb is not so common.

Well, not traditionally, but it is growing. The demand for lamb from consumers in the US has never been as high is for beef, pork and chicken. And, cattle ranchers here for many, many years despised sheep farming as a waste of good cattle grazing land. Lamb really never had a fair chance in Merica till to foodie-boom took off.

But now, Texas is actually a leader in lamb production within the US, and the US lamb industry is trying to get us Mercans to eat more lamb. They have rather modest goals of about two-percent growth per year in US production of lamb.

It makes sense. If we can produce it here, it should be cost competitive, since it can't be cheap to ship meat from Austrailia to the US.

CD
 
Well, not traditionally, but it is growing. The demand for lamb from consumers in the US has never been as high is for beef, pork and chicken. And, cattle ranchers here for many, many years despised sheep farming as a waste of good cattle grazing land. Lamb really never had a fair chance in Merica till to foodie-boom took off.

But now, Texas is actually a leader in lamb production within the US, and the US lamb industry is trying to get us Mercans to eat more lamb. They have rather modest goals of about two-percent growth per year in US production of lamb.

It makes sense. If we can produce it here, it should be cost competitive, since it can't be cheap to ship meat from Austrailia to the US.

CD

We have been exporting live sheep to Arab countries for years. It's highLy controversial . We eat lots of lamb here, all grass fed and natural. The price has come down lately.

Russ
 
I'd like to hear more about food in Europe. I'm thinking citrus is probably not a big cash crop in Norway, but surely people in Norway eat citrus. Is it coming from Spain, or even North Africa?

Likewise, I'm thinking your best cod and haddock are not abundant in the Mediterranean, so is there a good harvest of cold water fish moving South to France and Spain? Do people in France and Spain even care about cod and haddock?

CD
 
True - as a whole, Americans eat very little lamb. I posted about it on here before. There was even an article in US News & Business Report (or maybe Forbes) about how over half of Americans have not even tried lamb. Let that sink in...
I remember years ago my husband and I took another UK student and an American student to walk the west highland way (a long distance footpath in Scotland).
We were getting to Glasgow by train but the first intercity train had been cancelled. That wasn't the one we had reserved seats on luckily, but it meant that the train was packed. It was literally standing room only in the corridors and we had had to insist on having our seats (we were on the train for hours to it's destination).
Whilst we were going through the Lake District an area of England that is well known for sheep. We've been brought up with them in our lives. A daily occurrence, often rescuing them in winter, hand feeding them in spring (ish) and so on...

So, as we were going through the Lake District, this American, Greg, suddenly states "what are those white things? " in a very loud voice very a pack train carriage. The entire carriage feel silent (this is years before the internet even took off) leaving us also speechless. "Do you mean the sheep? " was all I could come up with. The carriage is still totally silent, waiting for his reply. By now even he is aware that this is an odd question to be asking... he'd never seen the ocean before, let alone a sheep... We had an interesting 8 days hiking with him to say the least...
 
I'm thinking citrus is probably not a big cash crop in Norway, but surely people in Norway eat citrus. Is it coming from Spain, or even North Africa
I actually don't recall seeing much fresh citrus (as in lemon or orange) but orange juice did feature widely in the supermarkets. Same in the north of Sweden and Finland (I spent most childhood holidays in Scandinavia shopping with my honeymoon and then cycled from the southern part of Denmark, right the way through Sweden and Norway to the very far north of mainland Norway via the Lofoten Islands, up to Nordkapp (North Cape), over to the Russian Norwegian border at the Barents Sea, then back down through Finland (along the Russian border) to Estonia and into Eastern Europe).
Apples, rhubarb etc were abundant. Plums Damsons the same.
The further south you were the more chance you had and fresh fruit wad often available in the foyer of expensive hotels and in the rooms (apparently! )
 
Australia is very much like the UK was back in the 70's growing up. British made, British this that the other... here everything has a stamp on it that tells you what percentage Australian it is. Most stuff is proudly stamped 100% Australian Made or 100% Australia ingredients, Grown and Made entirely in Australia and so on. (I'll see if i can find some examples when i get home).

But with an entire continent to 'play with', even if most of it is dessert, its hardly difficult to grow most of what is wanted (I won't say needed).
 
I remember years ago my husband and I took another UK student and an American student to walk the west highland way (a long distance footpath in Scotland).
We were getting to Glasgow by train but the first intercity train had been cancelled. That wasn't the one we had reserved seats on luckily, but it meant that the train was packed. It was literally standing room only in the corridors and we had had to insist on having our seats (we were on the train for hours to it's destination).
Whilst we were going through the Lake District an area of England that is well known for sheep. We've been brought up with them in our lives. A daily occurrence, often rescuing them in winter, hand feeding them in spring (ish) and so on...

So, as we were going through the Lake District, this American, Greg, suddenly states "what are those white things? " in a very loud voice very a pack train carriage. The entire carriage feel silent (this is years before the internet even took off) leaving us also speechless. "Do you mean the sheep? " was all I could come up with. The carriage is still totally silent, waiting for his reply. By now even he is aware that this is an odd question to be asking... he'd never seen the ocean before, let alone a sheep... We had an interesting 8 days hiking with him to say the least...

In fairness, I've driven through the Lake district many times, and have seen the sheep there, and they are not what most Americans would identify as sheep on first look. They are huge, and have long hair. I know my first reaction waas, "look at the size of those sheep."

Further down the road at lake Windmere, I also blurtred out, look at the size of these geese/swans. Thank goodness they were not mean like American geese and particularly American swans. These suckers were literally face to face with me at 5-foot-eleven.

American swans are really mean. One chased my wife across a field biting at her a$$. I took pictures, of course. It came back for a shot at me, and I grabbed it by the neck and we had what we call in Merica a "come to Jesus" meeting. The goose and I got along just fine after that. I lived on a lake full of ducks and geese in Ohio (near TastyReuben) for a couple of years. Geese and swans are mean, but it doesn't take long to learn they cant really hurt anything bigger than a small puppy.

Oooops, I've drifted off topic. Ummmm, we have sheep here, too. :okay::whistling:
 
Our neighbors had sheep, I used to love them because they were so soft. Sheep here aren't for eating, they're for shearing.

Goats are huge here right now, but as pets as much as anything. Everybody around here wants to play pretend farmer, they get a goat and a couple of chickens, throw them in their suburban backyard, read Mother Earth News online, go to the farmer's market once a week, then tell everybody how they're living their real life. They're not farming, they just have a very small petting zoo. :)

I did want to clear up earlier that we do have plenty of dairy operations in the state, just not around where I live.
 
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