I read this book about a year ago when I started thinking seriously about what food to feed our family. I have given many copies away since - it is a great book about the American food supply, organic food, eating locally and understanding the choices you have in the supermarket or Whole Foods.
I learned a lot of interesting things in this book - like that Iowa imports 85% of its food because it only produces corn and soybeans and that most of the corn grown in this country isn’t eaten as corn, but as another corn based product that we don’t even know about or fed to cows and pigs to fatten them quickly. McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets are 55% corn! Why didn’t they just go ahead and make them vegetarian? Don’t even get me started on feeding corn to cows and pigs - again, I didn’t know this but cows aren’t supposed to eat corn (corn-fed always seemed like a feature!). Their stomachs’ can’t digest the corn as well as grass, so they can’t get hot enough to kill the bacteria and we end up with e coli, among other things. According to Pollan, if the feedlots fed the cattle grass for the two days prior to slaughter, 80% of e coli would be eliminated. They don’t do that of course. Instead, they pump them full of antibiotics and hope that everything will be okay. Let’s just let them be cows and eat them as cows are meant to be eaten! It works better for everyone.
Anyway, I highly recommend this book. Its a quick read and the author has an engaging style that made the facts and figures not too dry.
Another great book in this genre is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
Send In Advice!