Step 1: Organic Milk

This is sort of the start of a spontaneous series I just thought of--recording my journey to buying higher quality food. This makes more sense to me than rambling for pages on each grocery budget.

Next time I go to the store, I am going to buy organic milk. I've done a lot of reading and I've decided, yes, organic milk really is better for you. You can read some stuff here and here. I found one hilariously poorly written / designed website bashing organic milk here.

Basically, it doesn't have any growth hormones, pesticides, or any other nasty stuff, and the cows are treated well and given (thanks to the new guideline which you can read about here) or here, a required 120 days in pasture in season.

Now that I decided to go organic for milk, I had to pick a brand. I read around, but I feel really daunted by trying to find a local farmer to buy from. Although I really shouldn't because the Cincinnati area has a lot of small farmers.

I read about Horizon, Organic Valley, and several others. these were the main two I was deciding between.

After I thought I had decided, I thought it was time to look for dirt. So I started searching for things like "organic milk deception" and "top organic brands" to make sure I was finding everything there was to find. One of the most helpful sites I found was here.

After doing my research, I've concluded that I will be buying from Organic Valley. They are basically a ginormous co-op of hundreds(?) of small-time, local farmers. Local milk from local farms goes to local stores--I love it. The only thing I could find negative about Organic Valley, was that they recently banned "raw" milk on their farms. No conspiracies, no hiding behind the regulations or skirting the issues, just making business decisions as businesses sometimes do. Plus, Horizon's website is so irritating to navigate.

Organic Valley has a helpful store locator which I've used so I now am fully equipped to buy milk I feel good about. Also, they have coupons!

I did just buy a gallon of non-organic milk tho, so I'm going to use that up before I buy organic, I don't want to waste it. I'll let you know how it goes!