We are what we eat

...and what we eat eats. Which, by the way, is mostly corn, stripped of its nutrients and transformed into things like icing and chicken McNuggets. My epic article about Michael Pollan's new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, went up Tuesday. Reading his book, which is currently #1 on Amazon, was so eye-opening and depressing that it caused me to sob all the way through the last hour of King Kong. I mean, Naomi Watts was good and all, but what I was really weeping for was humankind's rape and subjugation of nature. I think this stuff has really gotten to me. Once you open your eyes to what industrial agriculture is doing to the land, our health, and the animals it treats like widgets of protein, you can't close them again.

We have to look. We have to ask questions. The FDA and the USDA are not looking out for us, and neither is Whole Foods or Trader Joe's (whose chickens contain traces of arsenic, by the way). It's hard, but it's not that hard: Pollan persuaded me that even when there's not a best choice, there's still a better choice one can make. Is it expensive? Americans spend the smallest percentage of their incomes on food than any industrial nation. We spend half as much as we did in the 1950s, but twice as much on health care proportionately. Where's it all going? Is cable more important than good food? Than our health?

So, I'm thinking of starting a new blog with which to channel all my frustration and curiosity about what I should eat. My friend Sarah may join me. We'll write reviews of Bay Area restaurants that serve organic produce, and we'll hunt down studies like this one that reveal whose organic milk actually has "happy cows" making it.