Recently I found a local farm producing raw milk and other dairy products; yay me! This has already spawned additional contacts for me to talk to, to include some names of people known to be producing honey locally. One of these contacts in turn took me to what some people locally have taken to calling "a new thing being tried" on a once-a-week basis; farmers market.... okay, so I'll play along and try to look past the sentiment that some people have slipped so far that something like this is actually being thought of as something new. (shrug).

So I drove over to the local farm market on that one day of the week. There I had a chance to make contact with several local momNpop type "vendors". One fellow had a number of items he was offering - mostly produce, but to include organic chickens. We spoke for a while. It turns out his birds are of the usda-approved organic variety. Nonetheless, taking this as at least, for now, a step in the right direction, I bought one. Towards the tail end of this past winter, I had tried some certified organic birds from a different source and I can confirm, whether or not they are as healthy for me as they should be, they definitely produce a broth/stock that has a much more desirable shade of yellow color to it after the fat rises to the top. This also seems to produce a pleasing silky-texture as it goes past the lips and down into the stomach. I've come to notice that typical store-bought or concentration-camp birds tend to produce broth that favors a shade of green, as in puke green, that itself does not have the same pleasant flavor or texture to it that the memory banks of my taste buds claim to recall from many years back.

Then I visited the counter next to him where there was a woman who has a larger variety of produce, who also had a banner hanging from her table portending apples to come in another few months. Her wares also included some natural-made apple butter, as well as home-made lye soap. This resonates with me since I found a no-cook recipe, about 4 years ago, for making lye soap. She uses grain-fed pig lard as her fat ingredient. I brought up honey and we discussed this for a while too since she is familiar with a couple different local honey makers. The topic of this thing called CCD came up. This in turn caused a couple people standing by to overhear and informally become part of the conversation. It did not surprise me but I was still a bit disappointed to then observe how people have already taken this MSM-born thing called CCD and talk about it in terms of "yeah, we've seen it, but we are like everybody else, we have no idea why all the bees are dieing". The only remark I had for this was "well, as far as I know about this thing we people generally agree we do not know much about is, that there is no certainty that the bees are actually dieing, but instead they are just sort of showing up missing... as in awol, as in mysteriously gone, absent, as in if we knew more about this phenom we might find out the missing bees are still alive somewhere"

One thing of interest I learned just this week is that on a national basis, there are presently 28 states that still permit the "legal" sales - in some shape or form, of raw milk. Some of the legalities sort of speak to how fruity... flaky...inconsistent the form of such laws are still manifesting from one state to the next. To me, the overall fruityness-factor in this still speaks to an overall reason to be optimistic as long as there still are at least a few remnants of genuine individuality remaining in state constitutions, state by state, that in turn suggests that as of yet, all hope is not lost.