Michael Pollan has been on Wisconsin Public Radio and of course written
up for following "his" steer.
I don't see anything negative about using corn for animal production as
long as you meet the nutritional requirements of each class of
livestock. If you don't feed corn, then you are going to have to come up
with a substitute energy product.
Maligning agriculture in general, or maligning family restaurants
specifically is really misguided in my view. Agriculture and restaurants
respond to consumer preferences. We just got back from town and stopped
at McDonald's for lunch. We had one of the newer Asian roasted chicken
with gourmet salad, which includes quite a good and healthy amount of
greens, Blue Diamond Almond slivers, orange slices, peas, sugar pea
pods, and Paul Newman's Own Salad Dressing. Pretty hard to find any
fault with that product.
If expensive chicken is somehow better than cheap chicken, send us the
information on the difference! Most of these attacks are baseless as I
have yet to see ANY difference in food value! NONE!
It is all about suckering the upscale folks who will spend well over $1
for even a particular drink of water. And it comes in an enviornmentally
unfriendly plastic bottle often shipped long distances and sometimes
having unhealthy contaminants compared with local water from the tap.
By the way, my wife reported to me that A&W (an old time family
restaurant chain here in the U.S.), is running ads claiming that they
are no using Australian beef in their burgers, but only U.S. beef.
Perception is reality on both sides of the food equation.
Rick W.
Jonathan & Nina White, Cheesemakers wrote:
> "Ain't no such thing as cheap feed", to reinterpret the old
aphorism.
> By the bushel, corn may sound cheap. But when you figure in animal
> health, environmental inmpact from tillage, transport, nitrogen
> fertilizer production, manure runoff, etc, etc. so-called "cheap
feed"
> is not much better than cheap chicken at the fast-food joint.
>
> I recommend that everyone who farms, or eats for that matter, ought to
> read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" by Michael Pollan.
>
