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RSS FeedMarian Burros year’s end overview of food news includes two good points, among others, that are important to reiterate. The first is that food became emphatically political this year due in large measure to Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Marion Nestle’s continuing work, and a growing general interest in where our food comes from. She quotes Nestle, who says, “this is the year everyone discovered that food is about politics and that people can do something about it”—with their shopping carts. It’s a subject I wrote about for Edible East End, and is more true than we may realize.
The other point was that our ground vegetables have apparently killed people this year—a point worth noting because just a few years ago, the main source of E. Coli contamination had been ground beef. Now it’s been found in most animals, gets into water supplies, and is even carried by the wind. I’ve been thinking about this since the outbreak last fall:
What do you think of the sale of food from cloned animals if the FDA approves it? They’ve approved it in a draft ruling.
I find it irritating. I’d like to know who initiated it. I think it’s a political move on the part of whichever agribusiness segment is looking to profit from large scale production of cloned animals for eating. Cloning animals for food won’t be viable for many many years, but agribusiness is already readying the customer to accept it. It’s lobbying and politics and is about money, not about the consumer or what’s good for us or good for the world. It’s about business.
Yup…you’ve got to get the consumer warmed up to such a radical idea before you can push it on them. The majority of the public won’t bite at this point.
Considering the amount of controversy still surrounding genetically modified *vegetables*, I think the average consumer is going to be extremely reluctant to eat cloned meat. There’s something very soulless about the idea. Not very logical, I know, but it gives me a little shudder.
I can’t help thinking of “The Sixth Day” and those RePet people. Is that next?
next we’ll be jacking our farm animals into a neruo-net matrix-style, where they live a wondefully happy and compete life from the confines of their “processing box”.
now theres an otherland for ya
Now I want to see Animal Farm, Matrix-style. Ow, my brain.
I just spoke to someone about Pollan a couple days ago, and he told me about a book called “The China Study.” He’s reading it and said he’s afraid to eat meat.
Supposedly Zhou En-Lai started the largest study on the effects of what people ate and came to the conclusion that animal products cause heart disease & cancer. I looked up “The China Study” on Wikipedia and from reading a critical review link on the bottom of the page, I get a strong feeling that the PETA terrorists are blazing another agitprop trail. According to the review, the book reaches conclusions without conclusive evidence.
Sound familiar?
God, PeTA pisses me off. Eating animal products may or may not cause cancer, but getting in my face about eating animal products will absolutely cause me to pimpslap you.
PETA=People Eat Tasty Animals.
E-zackly. They hate it when you say that. *G*
I think “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan is one of the most imortant books written in the last 10 years. Or maybe even longer than that. It may actually CHANGE the way that people think about food.
I think “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan is one of the most imortant books written in the last 10 years. Or maybe even longer than that. It may actually CHANGE the way that people think about food.