This post is part of my series, “Kickin’ It Old Skool: Why and How We Are Old-Fashioned” or KIOS for short.  If you’re new to the series, please read my disclaimer before continuing on.  I’m keeping a table of contents to this series here so you can see what I’ve already written about and what more there is to come.

Before I go any further and write about what we actually eat, I thought I should tell you a few of the things that we don’t do.

• We don’t expect others to eat the same way we do.
• We don’t expect other people to serve us different food when we go to their house for a meal.  In other words, we accept the hospitality given to us and don’t complain! In the interest of full disclosure, this is not to say that I don’t sometimes in my head think, “I wonder if __________ is in season right now?”  I don’t do this because I’m condemning the other person for serving that food. (See the first sentence of this point.) Rather, it’s just pure habit at this point.  I do it every time I buy a vegetable or fruit and I just can’t stop myself!
• We very rarely go out to eat unless we’re eating at a restaurant that shares the same values about food that we do (the exceptions primarily being if we are going out with other people and someone else has chosen the location).  This means that there is a very small selection of restaurants that we want to go to in Baltimore.  It also means that those restaurants are more expensive and so we don’t go to them that often.  This also means that we don’t eat fast food if we can at all avoid it (with the rare exception of Chipotle, maybe 2-3 times a year).
• We don’t spend our own money on meat, dairy, eggs, etc that have been raised in inhumane conditions. However, if we are offered such items as part of a meal through the hospitality of others, we do eat it.

Do you see what I’m getting at here?  In our own home, with our own money, we have certain guiding principles and rules that we follow.  We don’t expect others to do exactly what we do though and we have chosen to prioritize our relationships with other people over our food choices.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t desire others to make similar decisions about food, particularly when it comes to the care and raising of the animals that we eat.  However, we certainly don’t expect that every person or every family will choose to eat exactly what we do.

So don’t feel like you have to walk on eggshells around us when it comes to food, OK? 🙂