Natural Perspectives:

Many people like lamb for Easter. We think of it as spring lamb, but actually lambs are born in spring and slaughtered in the fall. To get a leg of spring lamb now means buying meat from Australia or New Zealand, where it is fall.

You know how Vic and I feel about imported food. The more distance our food travels, the more fossil fuel is burned in its transport. That means more carbon dioxide in the air, which increases global warming, which raises sea level, which will eventually flood out Huntington Beach.

We’d like to think that our town will go on forever, but some of the current figures we’ve seen on melting ice in Greenland and the Antarctic suggest ocean levels may rise 20 feet within the lifetime of people living now, and may rise up to 200 feet in another couple of centuries unless something is done to curb carbon dioxide emissions. That level of sea rise would spell doom for coastal cities like ours.

Vic and I wanted lamb for Easter, but we didn’t want it to come from down under. So for our spring lamb, we planned ahead. Way ahead. Last fall, I visited localharvest.org to find some lamb growers in Southern California. I had two goals. One was to find a local farmer who would sell me a lamb. My second goal was to support heritage breeds. By buying (and eating) a rare breed of lamb, we would be promoting the survival of that breed.

All domestic sheep are the same species, but a tremendous amount of genetic diversity exists among the different breeds. The same holds true for other domesticated livestock and poultry.

These various breeds have been developed over many, many centuries throughout the world. Each has unique genetic characteristics such as resistance to disease or tolerance of extreme climate conditions. This may become of great importance.

When a particular breed dies out, its unique genes are lost. Modern food production promotes the use of a very few specialized breeds. These animals are raised by agribusinesses to the exclusion of other breeds. Fortunately in developed countries, there are a handful of farmers who are committed to preserving endangered breeds.