What are we eating?

I went to Costco yesterday to get new tires and ended up shopping for food instead. While there I noticed how much everyone was buying. Later in the day someone told me that they can't go to Costco and leave without spending $500. Most of what was being bought were 2 month supplies of candy bars, snack foods, chips, and other assorted processed delicacies. Now don't get me wrong....I'm the first to jump at some tortilla chips. But it got me thinking...that and the fear of God that is being put into me about our industrial food system as I finish Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma.

First of all nearly everything that we eat is made of corn...either animals that are now force feed corn instead of allowed to graze grass gracefully, or sweetened, preserved and tweaked by processed food additives all coming from, you guessed it - corn. So I laughed out loud reading the Chronicle today in which the article "Not Cutting the Mustard" points out that with the increase of corn prices (because of ethanol production pushing in the MidWest) Heinz now has to sweeten its ketchup with sweeter tomatoes instead of with corn syrup. Is this a tragedy especially when compared with the recent tortilla crisis in Mexico which is also a consequence of ethanol pushing and dramatic increases in corn prices?





So while downing a corn-feed oig polish sausage in a corn-sweetened bun and topped off with high-fructose sweetened (another corn by-product) coke I was staring at the idyllic and pastoral image of a farm on the box of milk I'd just bought. It brought up images of some beautiful countryside with the barn located somewhere between a babbling stream and a cool forest and some clothesline swaying in the wind in the distance. When in reality the milk I'm buying for my children was most likely taken at a dairy farm that rivals Manhattan for density of inhabitants per square mile. Then scanning down I noticed the double disclaimer....that the cows producing this milk were not given growth hormone...then lower with an * - the teaching moment disclaimer that growth hormones have not been found to make a significant difference in taste, quality or tumor growth. Now I'm not a victim...I know what I was buying and where I was buying it....but still it's an opportune moment to gripe.

In the Tribune on Tuesday there was an Op-Ed article about how Quality, Whole, Organic, TJ's, Farmer Joe's or Slow Food (any and all of the above) are bringing change and opportunity to the city of Oakland...not just calorie-wise, but mirroring the gentrification, or re-emergent metropolitan dynamism (you choose the term that best fits your perspective) in Oakland. Read the article HERE.

I gotta go, my Big Mac is up and I'm in a hurry to get to the doctor to be checked for rBST Tumors in my stomache.