Most of you know already that I abhor fast food. I just can't stand it. I hardly ever touch it, and I think its gross that my husband is oddly cultish about the damn McRib. A few times during my pregnancies I craved really horrible fast food meal. With my oldest, I ate a Whopper once a day for nearly two weeks. These days I can't even look at them!
I have always tried to be educated and informed about the food that I feed my family. I have always made our baby food, instead of buying processed industrial baby food (plus its SO inexpensive! Try it!). I try to get what I can from the farmers market, and when I'm at the grocery store I read labels and not just prices. Sometimes we can't afford to eat the way I would REALLY like to, but I try to do the best I can with what we got. I thought I had it down pat...
Until I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.
HOLY CHICKEN SHIT.
Has anyone else read this book?! OH MY GOD.
I knew about the influx of corn into nearly every food product we eat today, but did you know that there are, on average, 45,000 products in your supermarket? Did you know that of those 45,000 more than a quarter of them contain corn in one form or another?
From his book-
"American farmers produce 13 million bushels of corn a year. (That's up from 4 billion bushels in 1970." Of those 13 million bushels, 10% goes into processed foods.
Ew.
The same wet milled corn starch products that create industrial baby foods, instant puddings, custards, instant teas, low-cal sweeteners and salad dressings also create pastes, glues, fiberglass, insecticides, wallpaper, and leather products.
And we eat them...
The same native starch used to create precooked, frozen meals also creates dry-cell batteries, detergent, and charcoal briquettes.
And we eat them!
Chicken nuggets from McDonalds?! HORRIBLE. Chicken Nuggets, made by Tyson for McDonalds, contain, among other things, tertiary butylhydroquinone- a form of butane.
Pollan offers a list of possible ingredients in cattle feed- chicken manure, cattle manure, chocolate, cement dust, molasses, candy, urea, hooves, feathers, meat scraps, fish meal, pasta, peanut skins, brewery wastes, cardboard, feather meal, chicken litter (bedding, feces & discarded bits of feed from chicken farms) chicken, fish, and pig meal.
This is what we are intentionally ingesting?!
Not so fast you might say. But I eat organic you might say....get the book, read the chapter on Industrial Organic. It is eye opening.
I will leave with this quote- "The fast food meal seems cheap, but as we have seen, the costs are actually enormous. The industrial food chain costs each and every one of us: in government spending, in pollution, in global warming, and in our health."
He also leaves us with a bevy of resources and a list of ways to start changing how we view food, and how we view our natural surroundings.
I would STRONGLY suggest this book to EVERYONE.
Now, who's hungry?
xoxo,
J.Danger
