New thoughts about what we eat

My neighbor Sue talks--a lot!--about a book that she said was life-changing. It changed the way she thinks about the food she puts in her body and in her children's bodies. Even listening to her, without reading the book, I decided I was eating too much red meat. I emailed the title to Melanie, because I know she's interested in such things, and she quickly wrote back that she owned the book. So the last time I was in Frisco I borrowed it. But it's languished on my desk--well, I had a Dick Francis and a J. A. Jance to read--but I had delved into a bit of it, and tonight I got farther into it, though I surely haven't come to grips with all of it. It's The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.
After you read this book, if you do, you may want to swear off red meat--my neighbor, Jay, knowing nothing about the book, said he's given up red meat for Lent and hasn't missed it at all. But the book details what happens to a beef and what goes into its body in that short trip from pasture to feedlot to slaughterhouse. And it isn't pretty. I can't even begin to simplify it, but cattle are fed corn instead of grass--their natural food--so that they gain weight much faster than nature intended them to. And that causes all kinds of health problems--well over half the cattle slaughtered have diseased livers. Some die in the feed lot; all are fed antibiotics. The tale goes on and on.
Even organic doesn't really protect you, because there's now "industrial organic" as opposed to "agribusiness." Okay, "industrial organic" is better, but it's sure far from the practices of Joel Salatin, a self-described "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer" in Virginia who raises cattle, poultry, swine, rabbits, and turkey, and won't even ship his produce because to do so would be not serious about energy and seasonality and bioregionalism. He rotates his pastures--when the cattle move off, the chickens move in. Want his meat? You'll have to go to his Poky Place Farm to get it.
Pollan raises the whole issue of the misleading terms of organic and free range that lull many of us into thinking we're eating healthy. Know what free range chicken means? There's a door from the chickens' cage out onto the grass, but they're not allowed out there for a few weeks because they might catch something. When the door is opened, probably few venture out. And at the most a month later, they're slaughtered. Free range isn't what you and I thought.
OK. I'm not doing a good job of conveying the very complex material that Michael Pollan deals with. But he does a good job of it, in a readable manner, and I'm watching my diet from now on. Read the book!
And me? I want to go visit Joel Salatin.