Setting a personal sourcing standard(s)

So from Part 1 of this guide you’ve got a feel for the meat production landscape out there, and you’re ready to move your personal buying further from factory sources and closer to family farms. The next step is coming up with a practical standard to guide your daily shopping and dining decisions based on what matters most to you, how much time and energy you have, and what you can afford. Basically a prioritization effort where you sift all the possible inputs to shake out something actionable. Visually we think of it like this:

For us, getting through that top part was all about digging in and doing a ton of research. But let our deep dive be your shortcut with these tools for filling in the blanks of your own standard:

• Try our standards on your shopping - If you’re pinched for time and want to go straight to an example to try, take our standards for a test drive on your shopping and dining for a while. See how they handle the curves of daily eating. Then tune to your situation as needed.
• Learn 5 simple questions for evaluating any animal protein - As many terms and labels as there are, this whole sourcing business can be boiled down to 5 simple questions you can ask across animal proteins for better quality across the board. See the 5 we used, along with our take on the answers.
• Get the cliff notes view by animal - Maybe you’re all about the beef or want to go straight to the answers on chicken, this quick summary will show you what to look for by animal.
• Find specific terms - Terms abound it’s true, so our glossary is your resource for term look up, to learn more about the language of sourcing and to improve your label reading game. We’ve organized the terms by the standards we follow to give you a sense for how terms and actionable guidelines can synch up.