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Food with Integrity – Coffee & Ethical Bean
Food with Integrity
Coffee is the world’s second-largest traded commodity after oil – ever think your morning pick-me-up could have far-reaching effects on global trade and our environment?
Fair Trade is about making changes to conventional trade, which frequently fails to deliver on promises of sustainable livelihoods and opportunities for people in the poorest countries of the world. Poverty and hardship limit people’s choices while market forces tend to further marginalize and exclude them. This makes them vulnerable to exploitation, whether as farmers and artisans, or as hired workers within larger businesses.
Fair Trade seeks to change the terms of trade for the products we buy and is based on a partnership between producers and consumers that allow small-scale farmers to earn a decent living for their efforts. This allows farmers to improve their lives and plan for the future while covering the cost of sustainable production.
When a product carries the Fair Trade mark it means that both producers and traders have met Fair Trade standards. These standards are designed to address the imbalance of power in trading relationships, unstable markets, and the injustices of conventional trade. There are two sets of standards which acknowledge different types of disadvantaged producers. One set applies to small, farmer/producer-owned cooperatives. The other set applies to workers, whose employers pay a decent wage, guarantee the right to join unions, ensure health and safety standards, and provide adequate housing where relevant.
Fair Trade sets guaranteed minimum prices that must be paid to producers. This price aims to ensure that producers can...
Food with Integrity – Factory Farming
Food with Integrity
Factory Farming – “If you grew as fast as a factory-farmed chicken, you would weigh 349 pounds at age 2.” – University of Arkansas Agricultural report.
“Factory farming is an attitude that regards animals and the natural world merely as commodities to be exploited for profit. In animal agriculture, this attitude has led to institutionalized (and legal) animal cruelty, massive environmental destruction and resource depletion, and animal and human health risks.”
It is a sad reflection on our society that over 95% of the 650 million animals raised and slaughtered for food in Canada today are mass-produced on factory farms. The idyllic images of green pastures and roaming animals are now outdated, and have been replaced by filthy windowless sheds, tiny wire crates, and other cruel confinement systems. Animals that were once raised humanely and that enjoyed a relatively enjoyable existence now suffer neglect, mutilation, genetic manipulation, and drugs that cause chronic pain and death. Sadly, Canada’s anti-cruelty laws do not protect farm animals from suffering caused by factory farming systems provided they are considered standard industry practice. For example, it is legal to house seven laying hens in a cage the size of a microwave or to crate a pregnant sow for her entire adult life.
Common features of factory farming include the following:
- Large numbers of animals housed together indoors
- Intensive confinement for extended periods of time
- Extremes of overcrowding or isolation
- Mechanized feeding, watering, handling
- Insufficient room to turn around, lie down, groom, or express normal behaviours
- Premature separation of...
Food with Integrity – Refined Sugar
Food with Integrity
SUGAR: Refined Sugar vs. Unrefined Sugar
The 2003 “Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases” report issued by the World Health Organization concretely linked an increased intake of refined sugar with cancer, diabetes, and obesity. Refined sugars can be found under a number of guises, including sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, white sugar, and high-fructose corn syrup. White sugar (sucrose) is one of the most dangerous refined sugars and has managed to pervade most of the packaged foods we eat.
What is White Sugar?
White sugar (Sucrose) is a highly processed, refined compound derived from sugar cane and/or sugar beet. Both plants contain yellowish brown raw sugar crystals, which are extracted from the crushed plants and bleached with sulphur dioxide before centrifuge machines remove any large impurities such as dirt and animal dung. From here the sugar is passed through sweetened cloths and bathed in phosphoric acid and calcium hydroxide to release the iron present in the sugar. If iron is present in sugar, the crystals will eventually turn gray and it will not be fit for sale. Finally, the liquid sugar is filtered through animal bone charcoals that absorb non-sugar impurities and dried to a white powder. The resulting product is 99.9% sucrose and almost completely void of nutritional elements.
What is Brown Sugar?
Brown sugar is simply refined white sugar mixed with molasses syrup.
Health Risks Associated with Sugar
White sugar suppresses the immune system by decreasing the vitality and number of white blood cells, the body’s immune response to invaders. It makes the body...
Food with Integrity – Fair Trade
Food with Integrity
Coffee is the world’s second-largest traded commodity after oil – ever think your morning pick-me-up could have far-reaching effects on global trade and our environment?
Fair Trade is about making changes to conventional trade, which frequently fails to deliver on promises of sustainable livelihoods and opportunities for people in the poorest countries of the world. Poverty and hardship limit people’s choices while market forces tend to further marginalize and exclude them. This makes them vulnerable to exploitation, whether as farmers and artisans, or as hired workers within larger businesses.
Fair Trade seeks to change the terms of trade for the products we buy and is based on a partnership between producers and consumers that allow small-scale farmers to earn a decent living for their efforts. This allows farmers to improve their lives and plan for the future while covering the cost of sustainable production.
When a product carries the Fair Trade mark it means that both producers and traders have met Fair Trade standards. These standards are designed to address the imbalance of power in trading relationships, unstable markets, and the injustices of conventional trade. There are two sets of standards which acknowledge different types of disadvantaged producers. One set applies to small, farmer/producer-owned cooperatives. The other set applies to workers, whose employers pay a decent wage, guarantee the right to join unions, ensure health and safety standards, and provide adequate housing where relevant.
Fair Trade sets guaranteed minimum prices that must be paid to producers. This price aims to ensure that producers can...
Food with Integrity – Aspartame
Food with Integrity
At the top of Nature’s Fare’s banned ingredient list is Aspartame. This excitoxin has been linked with both chronic and acute disease yet is present in over 6,000 different consumer foods and beverages including diet sodas and gum. Despite its prevalence in conventional food, you’ll never find aspartame in anything sold at Nature’s Fare. If you are looking for a zero calorie, zero carbohydrate, and zero glycemic index sweetener, we highly recommend stevia, an herb 300 times sweeter than sugar that has been used traditionally and safely for hundreds of years.
Aspartame
According to Osteopathic Physician Dr. Mercola, Aspartame is, by far, the most dangerous substance on the market that is added to foods. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener 200 times sweeter than sugar that is derived from the excrement of genetically modified e. coli bacteria. It is marketed under a variety of brands including Equal, NutraSweet, and Aminosweet, and is approved for use in over 6,000 consumer foods and beverages sold worldwide. Upon ingestion, aspartame breaks down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine (problematic only for those who suffer from phenylketonuria), methanol, formaldehyde, and formic acid. The increased aspartic acid significantly raises the blood plasma levels aspirate and glutamate, two neurotransmitters that facilitate the transmission of information from neuron to neuron. In excess, they kill neurons by allowing too much calcium into the cells and trigger the release of free radicals. The long term consumption of aspartame can therefore have serious and severe effects on neural health and can lead to disorders such...
Food With Integrity – Salt
Food with Integrity
Salt
All living creatures require salt to survive. We use this essential mineral to regulate the water content in our bodies, to replenish our electrolytes, and to promote optimum biological function and cellular maintenance. Unrefined salt has profound healing qualities because of its ability to balance the body’s intended mineral levels, and can nourish the adrenals, sinuses and bronchial passages, and digestive systems. However, the wrong kind of salt can lead to a multitude of health problems including high blood pressure, accelerated cellular degeneration, blood sugar abnormalities, and liver and kidney failure.
Table Salt (Refined Salt)
Although it is extremely unhealthy, refined salt is commonly used as a seasoning, pickling agent, or preservative in both home and commercial uses. Refined salt is derived from rock or ocean salt that has been mined, heat blasted, chemically treated, and mixed with iodine and anti-caking agents such as alumino-silicate to ensure it will not clump when packaged. The high-heat processing kills the nutrients in the salt, removing 82 of the 84 minerals found in sea water and leaving only sodium and chloride. Our bodies cannot recognize and utilize sodium as it needs to in this solo form.
Unrefined Sea Salt (also known as Celtic Sea Salt)
Unrefined Sea Salt is produced from the Atlantic seawater off the coast of Brittany, France using traditional hand methods of salt-farming. This type of salt is harvested using wooden rakes and is naturally air and sun-dried in clay ponds to preserve its living enzymes. Unrefined sea salt contains at least 84 trace...
Food With Integrity – Eggs
Food with Integrity
Food with Integrity – Eggs
Nature’s Fare is committed to selling only eggs from free-range and/or organic hens. Nature’s Fare does not purchase or sell any Battery Cage Eggs.
Battery Cage Eggs
The vast majority of egg-laying hens are confined in battery cages. On average, each hen is afforded only 67 square inches – less than a single sheet of letter paper on which to live her entire life. Caged hens suffer from the denial of many natural behaviourss such as nesting, perching, dustbathing, and endure high levels of stress and frustration.
Cage-Free Eggs
Cage-free systems offer hens a slightly higher level of animal welfare than a battery-cage system. Most cage-free hens live in very large flocks of many thousands of hens who never go outside. However, these hens are able to walk, spread their wings, and lay their eggs in nests. Cage-free egg producers must also provide perching and dust-bathing areas for the birds as well. These hens are spared several cruelties inherent in the battery-cage system, but it would be a mistake to consider cage-free facilities to be “cruelty-free”:
-Cage free farms typically buy their hens from the same hatcheries as battery-cage farms. Theses hatcheries kill male chicks upon hatching – more than 200 million each year in the United States alone
-Most cage-free hens have their beaks burned off, a painful mutilation
-Hens are typically slaughtered at less than two years old, far less than half their normal lifetime. They are often transported long distances to slaughter plants without food or water, and are often...
