Anyone going to read the Omnivore's Dilema?

[dorktv]

I have heard two interviews with the author and Corn is not our friend!

[XemaSab]

1. I'm SO there!

[Hissyspit]

2. I thought it was fascinating.

He seems to be the only one writing about some of this stuff.

[laheina]

3. Care to give a quick summary?

Corn isn't our friend--or corn syrup?

[NMMNG]

4. Corn everything

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594200823/103-9356482-4513459?n=283155


I only had time to scan the description as it's time for me to log off, but it appears to be a stab against the barrage of factory farmed and over-processed food products we're faced with her in the US.

[Hissyspit]

5. Buffy has it right basically, but author says Iowa is one of the most

unnatural/human-altered states in the U.S. The large-scale corporate farming has completely processed the landscape.

It's mainly the demand for high-fructose corn syrup which is a highly processed product and is in so many food products. The nitrates from the fertilizer from the farmlands goes down the Mississippi and has created a large deadzone (I think he said the size of New Jersey, but I may be wrong) in the Gulf of Mexico where fish swim in and die because there is no oxygen.

There are other sections in the book, too, so look at Buffy's link and google some reviews.

[mzteris]

6. neither -

Corn has a "huge" ecological footprint (the way it's currently grown)

Fossil fuel to grow, fertilizer run-off. Pollution of ground, air, and groundwater......


HFCS is in everything! and a major contributing factor to the current obesity epidemic.

[XemaSab]

7. There's corn in almost everything you eat

Even if you eat meat, the meat probably was raised on corn.

[dorktv]

10. And makes me wonder if we could get rid of the corn, would American's

lose all of our fat?

[Hissyspit]

11. He talks about the labeling of "free-range chicken," too.

20,000 chickens raised in a building. Two weeks after birth, a door opens that will allow them out into a green patch, if the chickens want to go out. The chickens don't go out because for the totality of their two-week life span, they have lived in the chicken building. In a few weeks they are carted off to slaughter.

Thus they can be labelled "Free-range."

He did speak of a farm he visited in the Shenendoah that he felt got it right, so to speak, mirroring the animal/plant cycle as found in nature. I forget the details.

[dorktv]

8. that reefer madness guy is too...Fast Food nation was another of his

books.

[Hissyspit]

9. Oh, yeah. Forgot about him. Thanks.

[XemaSab]

12. I gotta give another shout out to Michael Pollan

He wrote "The Botany of Desire" which was a TERRIFIC read.

Very, very, mellow, approachable, funny, and thought provoking.

[dorktv]

13. Good writers of science are to be treated like precious gems.

Because most people cannot do that.