The Omnivore's Dilemma

I got this Michael Pollan book for Christmas and finished it off a couple of nights ago. Fan-fucking-tastic. I mean, it's not high literature, but I agree with his premise completely: why are people more concerned about the price of food than the quality or consequences? Obviously food affects our health and the environment so why do we eat a lot of chemicals? His book has convinced me to swear off processed food and to buy only pasture-fed animal products, but it's going to be tough. I can get organic vegetables that are local at the farmer's market, but meat is another thing. There are local ranchers, but they either sell in bulk once a year or to grocery stores that are far from me. I checked out one local organic store, Country Sun in Palo Alto, because they have local pasture-fed beef, but the store is small and the meat was frozen. I'll have to try Dittmer's in Mountain View, but I don't know how much of their meat is local. It defeats the purpose to get food that has traveled a long ways (I make exceptions for bananas and other tropical fruit because I'm a hypocrite like that).

The other amazing part of the book is how much corn we eat. Corn feeds the cows, chickens and pigs we eat, corn is used to make high fructose corn syrup to sweeten stuff and other parts of corn are used for additives. All of this corn eating is possible only because the corn is subsidized. Otherwise, how could it be cheaper to process corn to make a sweetener rather than just get sugar from sugar cane? It's also not good for ruminants like cows to eat corn since it messes with their digestive system. Cows are designed to eat grass. By feeding them corn, they aren't as healthy and aren't as natural. I'm trying to get closer to the food chain to avoid the industrialization of food because I think natural food tastes better and is healthier. Unfortunately, a lot of organic food has been industrialized so I can't trust that label either. I don't care if the corn is organic or not; it shouldn't be fed to cows.

I also only want to eat animals that get to do what they want. Sure, they're being killed so I can eat, but I want their time to be well spent rather than cooped up in a cage in their own filth. That isn't ethical. Some vegetarians might argue that not eating them is even more humane, but animals in the wild die gruesome deaths all the time.