My food headache…

And so my headache begins…sitting in an airplane waiting to take off. I hear excerpts from conversations next to me, in front of me and the slamming of overhead bins. I'm trying to concentrate on my book and Pollen's long list of all the ways I eat corn. There's a lot.

Essentially, any food that's processed and packaged has processed corn products. And you thought you only ate corn from a can? Reading Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma has made grocery shopping even more of a chore than it already was. Even organic products are offenders. It seems as though nothing is safe from the long golden river of overproduced corn. All this depression and I'm not even halfway through the book. Did you know they are breeding corn that is engineered to produce its own pesticide? I know that many plant species have ways to defeat and ward away pests, but this just isn't the natural thing to do. Also, he talks about how it is not illegal to feed cows to cows, but part of their diet includes fat…in the form of beef tallow from the slaughterhouse they are headed to – because fat is fat (according to the slaughterhouse)! Another thing, poultry and pigs are fed leftovers from these slaughterhouses and then they're leftovers are fed to cows. In my book cows to pigs to cows = cows eating cows.

I'm not saying that corn or corn products are inherently bad, but too much of a good thing is too much. And Pollen also had an entire section about how we're stuffing our cows, poultry, and swine with corn they are not biologically capable of digesting. That's why we get e. coli in our meat supply; cows (who normally have low acidic stomachs) are now full of acid and the e. coli that lives there is used to it and doesn't die when it hits our stomachs. Just one more reason I'm going to go pastured grass-fed meat. There's a local place called Burgundy Beef Pasture, they have a wide range of selections and they deliver to your home or office. The only draw back is the 10lb minimum, but I might have someone who is willing to split it with me. That being said it still isn't cheap, so Shinerman and I have decided that we'll cut back on meat. So my first meatless recipe is cheese manicotti.

Anyone know a good way to cook sweet potatoes and beets? Not necessarily together. Neither of us are fans of the sweet potato, but it came in our co-op food share this week.