****Thank you for all the orders! Turkeys have been sold out!*****
Mmmm….Few things bring a family together like a turkey dinner. The stuffing, basting, aroma and plenty of tender flavorful meat seems to transcend the meal into a memorable bonding experience everyone loves!
It’s even more enjoyable when you know the story of your turkey…Our turkeys are raised on open green pastures on certified organic farms. They run around chasing bugs, eating grass, breathing fresh clean air and are served vegetarian, GMO free, and certified organic feed. We believe giving them natural foods and treating them with dignity makes for healthier happier birds, and better tasting meat as well.
You’ll be comforted as you sit to carve the turkey to know they weren’t cooped up by the thousands barely able to move, with feed that may have included all sorts of unhealthy stuff.
We do not package the turkeys with any preservatives, solution etc., up to 10% of the weight of conventional turkeys can be such agents, so you get lets meat for your buck.
They are hand-harvested, one by one, in a zabiha halal manner, with a care, consciousness and thankfulness we believe is a part of halal principles.
You will receive them the week of or week before Thanksgiving, the exact date to be determined based upon the number of orders. There is a limited quantity, and the last day to order is November 11th!! We’ll contact you about shipping.
Some more information:
Turkey factory farming-(in case you want to see how the other side lives)
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If you haven’t yet, read The NY Times recent article about ground beef and E.Coli. It highlights many of the factors why E.Coli recalls still are quite common, in fact according to some it’s a problem that’s getting worse. It tells the story of one young lady who was tragically paralyzed by eating a hamburger.
The article made a lot of interesting points, here are a few gems to chew on, many of which you may have heard before:
- Packaged ground beef can be composed of the meat of hundreds of different cows that are not just across the county, but even from outside the US. They follow one batch of ground beef and its pretty amazing to see what they find.
- Some processors actually use ammonia, AMMONIA, in ground beef to kill E.Coli. Ever wonder what that slight chemically taste was? This was news to us!
- Most meat used is from spent dairy cows or steer too old to put in the feedlot system.
- Big meat industry players are not doing much to address this issue, in fact they lobby hard to ease testing for E.Coli
- One of the main sources of E.Coli is that cattle from feedlots are smeared with feces, after all they don’t see pasture, they are just knee deep in their own excrement, so wouldn’t you guess it’d find its way into the meat? Especially since slaughthouses kill thousands of animals in a day, rarely slowing up the production for animal welfare, or as we see in this case ensuring healthiness of the meat
There’s a lot more, so read it when you get a chance.
We did feel there was one unfortunate omission, they never addressed the question: ‘Why is there E.Coli in the first place’.
Well according to study after study, the high grain diet that is fed to cows in feedlots is a major culprit. Grain is fed since it will get cattle to slaughter weight faster and cheaper than grass but it also make cows very sick since their stomachs are suited for grass, not grain. Grain diets help to promote the development of new strains of E.Coli that are toxic to humans.
The point here is not to add ground beef to the growing list of things to be scared of; everything has some danger, riding a car, chewing gum etc. But the key here is that it doesn’t have to be this way, cattle do not have to be feed food that makes them sick and causes public health issues. They dont need to be kept by the thousands in packed stockyards with no access to pasture which causes significant environmental issues. But that is the modern food industrial complex’s means for providing $1.50/lb ground beef. Is it worth the price?
In case you are wondering, our beef is from cattle that are strictly grass fed, they never get any grain. And of course no use of antibiotics, hormones, ammonia or irradiation is ever used.
Some more information:
No E. Coli or Mad Cow Disease in Grass-Fed Beef
Diet And Disease In Cattle: High-Grain Feed May Promote Illness And Harmful Bacteria
Power Steer by Michael Pollan:
Most of the microbes that reside in the gut of a cow and find their way into our food get killed off by the acids in our stomachs, since they originally adapted to live in a neutral-pH environment. But the digestive tract of the modern feedlot cow is closer in acidity to our own, and in this new, manmade environment acid-resistant strains of E. coli have developed that can survive our stomach acids—and go on to kill us. By acidifying a cow’s gut with corn, we have broken down one of our food chain’s barriers to infection. Yet this process can be reversed: James Russell, a U.S.D.A. microbiologist, has discovered that switching a cow’s diet from corn to hay in the final days before slaughter reduces the population of E. coli 0157 in its manure by as much as 70 percent. Such a change, however, is considered wildly impractical by the cattle industry.
The founder of the most famous DC eatery, and the #1 ranked chili in America returned to his Lord
Bill Cosby and Ben Ali
President Obama at Bens Chili Bowl
From God we come and to Him we return….
Mahaboob Ben Ali passed away Oct 7th in Washington DC. Ben founded ‘Ben’s Chilli Bowl’ in DC in 1958 which was perhaps the best known eatery in the Metro area. Celebrities and politicians ate along side common folk in an establishment that saw the ups and downs of a DC neighborhood.
Ben was born in Trinidad to family that hailed from Northern Indian, and moved to DC to study dentistry at Howard University. He missed the spiciness of his Caribbean island and decided to open a restaurant to showcase the culinary tradition he grew up with. He created his own chili reciepe which is still a closely guarded family secret. When it opened U Street was known as ‘Black Broadway’ and regulars included such famous names as Duke Ellington and Red Foxx . Through the years the neighborhood had its ups and downs (riots, drug addiction), but Ben never moved locations, he was committed to the neighborhood and would see it through thick and thin.
Bon Appetit magazine ranked Ben’s Chili as the best in America, and it has remained a location where celebrities such as Shaquille Oneal, to Bill Cosby to President Obama have frequented.
Ben was an American Muslim, and in his life he manifested many noble qualities that we can all learn from.
He moved into the inner-city, and instead of opening an liquor store (sadly many in the inner-city are Muslim owned), he opened a restaurant where people could eat food that was prepared with care and love (and no pork products were ever on the menu). He helped to improve his neighborhood, in that way he was part of the solution not part of the problem.
He married an African American lady (who became Muslim), in doing so two constituents of the American Muslim experience, African American and Immigrant, were united in the most intimate of bonds.
Ultimately Ben was an entrepreneur, a neighborhood advocate and an American Muslim who rose to become nothing less than a DC institution we can all learn lessons from.
District Councilman Kwame Brown called Ali a civil rights pioneer and entrepreneur.
“Through the best times and the worst times in our city’s history, Ben was eternally optimistic,” Brown said in a statement. “It was 51 years ago, with the sale of Ben’s first hot dog, that a place was created that to this day transcends cultural, racial and political divides.”
A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that life expectancy rises in tough economic times, and declines when the economy is going strong.
The basic finding of the paper is that mortality rates tend to evolve in parallel to the economy,” said lead study author Jose Tapia Granados, an assistant research scientist at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “When the economy goes up, mortality tends to go up. When the economy goes down, mortality rates tend to go down, too.”
The study did not dig deeper as to why people lived longer, however several possible reasons have been given, including more disposable income means more money for food (overeating), cigarettes and alcohol. Some also think that increase in traffic accidents may play a factor. And, it is postulated, in times of economic prosperity people have more work to do and the stress levels are higher. Though in my experience during bad economic conditions there are less people to do the work so the ones that are left are overworked, I guess you could go either way with that.
Not surprisingly, the one type of death that increased in the Great Depression (which this study mainly focused on) was suicide, up 2%. but overall that has little impact on life expectancy. I was always under the impression that the increase in suicide was much higher during that time.
So its an interesting study, and certainly counter intuitive. It would be revealing for someone to pick up where this left off and help to answer the question ‘why’. I’d also like to see some trends regarding this not just from a physical health perspective, but mental and emotional as well.
While no one would argue being broke and unemployed is a desirable state, the opposite assertion–that being rich and materially ’successful’ is the key to happiness–is similarly untenable. You can’t buy happiness as they say. There have been studies I’ve seen previously that clearly indicate people who are less affluent (though not in grinding poverty) tend to have a higher level of satisfaction, contentment and happiness than those who are classified as rich. One reason I came across was that the more people had, the more they desired. Its also interesting to note that poorer people were more philanthropically generous as well.
On a deeper level, all these physical states come and go (rich, poor, healthy, sick etc.), indeed a single individual might expect to experience all of them several times in their life. So regardless of someone’s opinion about this study, the question is how do we effectively deal with all that life throws our way, how do we attain that happiness which we know instinctively we cant buy?
One might assert that the key to tranquility is a spiritual connection with the Divine which provides a rudder as we navigate through whatever material state we may find ourselves in…
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Reuters: Recessions may be good for your health: study
