I just read a great book. "The Carnivores Dilemma", by Michael Pollen. It is about how we get the food we eat and isn’t, in general, a happy story. I am even more attached to it than most of you will be because I wrote one of my diatribes a few months back about the same subject and I’m always gratified when a major author comes right out and agrees with me.

If you can’t bring yourself to read the book, it is pretty long and no pictures, he makes the point that you should avoid eating or drinking anything that doesn’t look like a part of the original or has a list of ingredients that are only found in chemical books and never on a farm.

He goes on to show how most of our food is produced without your well being in mind. Corn is force fed to animals in feed lots, animals much better equipped to eat grass than corn and then we are force fed the results, meat. It doesn’t make much difference what sort of meat, chicken, pork, lamb, beef and farm raised fish is mostly corn. I’m proud to say I have never eaten a bigmac. After reading this book I’m really happy about it. I’ve eaten an occasional Pringles potato chip which turns out to be less than 50% spud. Oh, I’ve sinned.

Then he writes about how it could be done, like back to the past. I didn’t know just how lucky I was to eat the food produced on our ranch for the first 20 years of my life. You don’t have that option and neither do I anymore, but we can get better food by going to road side stands and farmers markets during the summers when they are open. When we do shop at mega food giants we can buy unprocessed foods and cook it at home. Don’t eat things with a shelf life longer than the expected life span of your dog. If you don’t recognize it, don’t eat it. If you can’t pronounce the name of over half of the ingredients it’s yucky for you. Make that 99%. If corn syrup is a main ingredient get a standby reservation for a fat farm.

Soft drinks, cheeseburgers, French fries and Twinkies are not the 4 major food groups despite what Brad claims.

That same list is a major component of the food industry’s profit. We should believe that our health comes before profit when it comes to marketing food but give up on that old idea. Profit rules. We can get exotic fruits and vegetables from across the globe but mostly these fruits and the vegetables taste about the same as one another. For starters each is picked before it is ripe so as to withstand shipping. Secondly, only varieties able to look good after days or weeks in transit and storage are selected for shipment. Look good is the key, taste good isn’t something you find out until you get it home. Too late. Good nutrition isn’t ever in the math. Only profit is.

You can do something about the food you eat.

It is summer now and no matter where you live there is probably a "Farmer’s Market" nearby. Drop in. You may pay more per pound or per sack but you will get fresh produce or canned goods picked and processed when ready to be eaten rather than on schedule to be shipped across the world. You can really enjoy a fresh salad because it will be fresh. Oh so good.

Too bad that we can’t buy meat a Farmers markets but government regulations preclude that pretty much. The Agriculture Department is afraid we might get some meat that actually tastes good. Can’t have that. Try grass fat beef for a real change if you get the chance. Not at all like corn fed, really tastes like beef.

I think back to the ranch where I was fetched up. We milked our own cows twice per day so our milk was always fresh, cream too. Eggs we had to find like it was Easter every day because the hens laid eggs when and wherever. Dad and Mom had a huge garden, 1 acre as I recall, and we ate the best during the summer. Fall was when the orchard came in and we did well then too. Winter we ate squash and root vegetables. Then it was spring and we ate whatever came up fast. Meat was likely chicken during the summer, free ranging too an extreme, because larger meats were hard to preserve during the summer. Fall was wild game, winter beef and/or pork usually shared with a neighbor or two to make it last. Mom would say go out and "higgle" a piece of meat off that hind quarter, and we did. We canned a huge supply of fruits and vegetables each fall and buried vegetables in the ground under layers of soil and straw. Home canned meats make good stew. Not once did we need to read the labels before we sat down to dinner. I wish you could have been there.

We can never go there again I suppose but we can strive toward eating better. We can ask our Congress and Senate to stop subsidizing the agriculture that is poisoning us for profit and if they can’t subsidize good nutrition at least don’t help the other side any more. We can patronize local growers once in awhile. That’s a win-win. We can stop buying crap just because it is cheap.

Enjoy at least one meal per week.

Sleep well tonight.

Pat Chandler