Aisle Not: Why One Woman Quit Grocery Stores for a Year | TakePart – Inspiration to Action

I would love to be able to get to this point…

I hate the professional Food Industry almost as much as the Pharmaceutical Industry….

Both have greatly contributed to the unhealthy, over-weight lifestyle so many Americans now lead…

If you haven’t seen “Food, Inc”, buy it or put it on your NetFlix list today.  It’s a real eye-opener.

One year ago, Carla Crownover kissed grocery stores goodbye.

She had just seen Food, Inc., Participant Media’s documentary on the seedy underbelly of the food industry, and she wanted nothing to do with the conventional food system that feeds the majority of Americans.

She pledged to abstain from grocery stores for 365 days and to go on a quest to find out where all the food she eats comes from. The end result? “I’ve learned a lot,” she told readers on her blog, Austin Urban Gardens.

TakePart caught up with Crownover recently, fresh after her one-year mark, to learn more about what it’s like to live off the food grid.

Prior to seeing Food, Inc., Crownover was already a conscientious eater. “I shopped the perimeter of the grocery store and didn’t buy many products in boxes or cans. I didn’t want to eat anything that had been manipulated to cook faster, or be ‘instant,'” she explains. “I had dropped diet sodas from my diet a couple years ago, and was leery of foods manipulated to have a long shelf life.”

When she sought out more information from Food, Inc., the film shocked her.

“Everything about factory farming [in the film] disgusted me. The feedlots packed full of animals standing in their own waste bothered me on several levels. I like to eat beef, but I don’t want the animal to have to live a horrible and unhealthy life so that I can have a steak.”

She saw genetically engineered chickens in the film that were too big to stand and never saw the light of day. “The chickens I get now from a local farm are free range up until their last moment,” she says. “The farmer once told me, ‘We like to believe they only have one bad day.’ And I loved that.”

via Aisle Not: Why One Woman Quit Grocery Stores for a Year | TakePart – Inspiration to Action.