Corn Fed Nation

Count Beatniks among the legions of fans of Michael Pollan, a man who has single handedly deconstructed the agribiz/government complex and it's relationship to our shocking increase in obsesity and the precipitous decline in America's food quality. I have enjoyed all of his books but highly recommend that everyone read The Omnivore's Delimna if you haven't already. His insights into the rise of agribusiness with it's addiction to corn, chemicals and fossil fuels is revelatory - I consider it one of the most important books I've read in twenty years.

Michael would have been my choice for Secretary of Ag on my Fantasy Cabinet Team. I consider it a bad sign that Barrack has chosen an agribusiness poster boy, Sen. Tom Vilsack, to run the Department of Agriculture. Don't look for any breakthrough thinking on food or agriculture policy in the near term. By the way, my Fantasy Cabinet Team didn't work out so well, as Robert Kennedy Jr. didn't get EPA or Interior, and I think I had someone else slotted at State, but that's another story.

Pollan's site has some great resources for taking back our food at http://www.michaelpollan.com.

I'd also highly recommend novelist Barbara Kingsolver's ode to locally grown food Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

So now on my morning browse today, which normally includes two or three blogs I enjoy, I bumped into a review of Mark Bittman's Food Matters, A Guide to Conscious Eating. You can read that review here.

Bittman's book starts where Pollan leaves off and is part manifesto, part cookbook.

If I made New Year's resolutions, more conscious eating - a focus on a variety fresh, locally grown, chemical and hormone free foods - might be one of them.