Thoughts about food...

I grew up on a farm in Southcentral Pennsylvania.  My family raised cows, steers, hogs and chickens. I remember mucking out stalls, a smelly job one never forgets. My father was very particular about the cleanliness of his animals' dwellings.

So imagine my shock and horror when I watched a show on PBS called "Food, Inc." Thousands of chickens in darkened humongeous buildings with air piped in. These poor fowls live in inches of their own feces. Yes, a life most foul (pardon the pun, just couldn't help myself). Chickens have been engineered to have breasts triple the size of a non-engineered chicken to supply us with "healthy" chicken breasts. I guess God didn't make them big enough.

Our cows stood on fresh straw every day. Cows in our current food chain stand in feces and urine up to their knees...and e'coli is often in our meat. Hummm...wonder why? Years ago farmers were happy to yield 20 bushels of corn per acre. Now the crop has been re-engineered to yield 200 bushels an acre. Guess God didn't make corn good enough either.

Currently most Americans are addicted to sugar, corn and refined carbohydrates. I am one of them. I am also one of the over-weight Americans. Yes, I am dieting and working hard to change my eating habits, but years of indulgence have left their mark. I wish I could say we can undo the food engineering and remove the antibiotics used in our food chain. According to the show, over 70% of food in super markets has been chemically engineered. Read the labels of the foods you eat. Tonight I read the content label for our fat-free coffee creamer. It contains 0% fat, less than 2% of milk and 98% of chemical stuff that I can't pronounce. A wise person once said, "Never eat anything you can't pronounce." I think he or she was right.