After a sisterly outing for pedicures, I took Rachel home. Sitting in the passenger seat as I drove, she asked, “Did you see that video I posted on Facebook about the pigs?”
“No, I didn’t watch it, but I’ve seen them. I know what’s going on. I hate those videos.”
“You have to watch this. Hearing those piglets scream like that makes me want to never eat meat again.” As I turned the corner, I laughed at the irony of this conversation and joked, “You do know I’ve been blogging about this for three years, right?”

 * Consider yourself warned if you choose to watch the video – this may not be suitable for all audiences, as it says. 

With the same passion and conviction I felt when I first began reading things like The Omnivore’s Dilemma and watching documentaries like Food Inc., I listened to my sister as her whole experience with food as she once knew it got turned upside down. She described grocery shopping for the first time with this awareness, thinking about food not in terms of price, but instead with a compassion for the way the animals had been treated, or mistreated. With the assistance of an iPhone, she found herself in the middle of an aisle, googling names of companies and farms in order to make the most informed choice. My sister, the one who has loved a good ol’ fast food chicken sandwich for as long as I can remember, said she was swearing them off entirely. Not even would she order an ice cream from an establishment that would allow such animal cruelty.

We sat there in the car, parked outside of her building, and I listened to her describe this awakening, all the while thinking, where did I go wrong? And I asked her straight out. I’ve been making these food choices, feeling that passion, and writing about it for over three years. So why is she just hearing that message now? Where did I go wrong?

It is clear that seeing and hearing those animals in distress on videos – the immobilized pigs that become the bacon we consume without thinking – has the most impact of all. Seeing chickens, an animal that she has learned is full of life and personality because of her contact with my own hens, being hung from a conveyor belt and thrown into big vats of boiling water before they’re even dead – that is a message that could not be ignored. She has always been an animal lover and those images pulled at her heart-strings. Pretending those conditions don’t exist is easy. Out of sight, out of mind. But eating those animals without a guilty conscience after watching those videos is difficult.

In the supermarket this week, she struggled to navigate through the myriad of choices – organic, all-natural, free-range, Omega 3-enriched – and realized she was about to make a major life change. She said, “I tried to make sense of what to buy and I almost threw my hands up and said screw this. But I didn’t.” She conceded that buying fresh and humanely raised food was going to cost more and decided that she was ready to make that more of a priority. And then she realized, the girl who’d rather be on stage than in the kitchen, was going to have to learn how to cook.

This conversation left me intent on proving that this life can be a reality, even for her, on a budget much smaller than my own. Since it was the first of the month and I had yet to begin spending my monthly food budget, I decided I would dedicate myself to just such an experiment – try to live a whole foods, humanely raised, localtarian lifestyle on a budget. With just a few random vegetables coming out of my winter garden and only getting an egg every other day, this would be the perfect month for the test. Could I buy my food from reliable sources and eat the fresh food I love to eat on a budget?

So, here’s the plan. My food budget will be $160 for the month. I realize that there are families and individuals who have to live on even less, but this is where I’m going to start.  I will make everything from scratch this month – no leftovers from the freezer or canned goods from the summer. If I make something using the staples I already have, especially if it is a main ingredient like the flour in a homemade loaf of bread, I will add the cost of the bag of flour to my running tally and will deduct it from my budget. I’ll keep a list of my meals for the week, what I purchased to make them, keep track of the money spent, and will blog about it along the way. And there will be no exceptions made for things like, “Ok, the dish I’m bringing to this Super Bowl party doesn’t count.” Entertaining and eating with friends is something my sister and I both enjoy and I’m going to have to make that work as well. It’s amazing what you can do when you get creative.

Before she got out of the car to go inside after a half hour of this impassioned conversation, we concluded that people just have to come around to these decisions on their own time. Old habits die hard. And in the world we live in of convenience and pre-packaged food, a world where food is shipped in from as far as other continents to give us an abundance of choice year round, making conscious food choices takes work. But I assured her, that work gets easier. The time put in for research and a new food education is an investment – those decisions and meals will soon become part of your routine. And I know because that was me.