Today I ran into a couple friends in the pro-thoughtful-eating community, and we started talking about reasons we don’t eat commodity meat. I realized that it’s really easy — too easy — to explain why I generally don’t eat commodity eat or even much industrial food, but that really shortchanges the subject.

The thing is, we can talk forever about the numerous reasons I don’t want to put feedlot meat in my body, or support the infrastructure of industrial food and Western diseases, but that doesn’t begin to capture the reasons I care so much about finding and eating independently grown food made by people who care.

What I want to talk about is the joy of finding, making and eating real food.

The pleasure I experience when I know the people who have grown, procured and/or made with their own hands every item in my dinner.

The deliciousness of food that, in every stage of its being from the earth to a shed to a curing room or a kitchen to a plate, has been tended by people who care about the food and about me, as the person who will be nourished by it.

The wonder of talking to the farmer and artisan about the choices he or she made and how I’ll be able to taste them.

The richness and depth from learning with our friends how to grow and prepare traditional foods.

The laughter we share at the stories of the crazy characters and adventures that necessarily intertwine with ingredients which are themselves eccentric.

How every important aspect of my life has gotten better since I became part of a community of growers, eaters, cooks, neighbors. And how the unimportant aspects of my life such as competition and personal accumulation have become so clearly unimportant, which may be the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

Because of my job, I get to be a little closer than a lot of folks to the people who make real food happen. But their world is really open to anyone, and there’s lots of room. It doesn’t require working in a restaurant or even eating at one — it’s all there at the farm, at the farmer’s market, in our neighborhoods, and inside us, in our hands.