Searching For Good Food

Last night I rented “Food Inc”, a pretty startling movie about the sad state of food in the world. One of the main consultants for the movie, Michael Pollon, argues that what we eat today isn’t really food — it looks like food and sort of tastes like food, but it has been manufactured on assembly lines and is a really pale representation of what food used to actually be like.

Chickens are raised on farms and are grown so quickly that their legs can’t support their weight — after walking only a few steps most of these chickens fall down. Cattle are raised in close quarters, and spend most of their life standing in several inches of their own manure. All of this eventually trickles down the food chain, and ends up in the food that we eat.

With regards to beef, the majority (I believe around 90%) of Cattle are grain/corn-fed these days. It should be noted that cattle weren’t ever meant to eat grain, and it actually is a major shock to their system. Strangely enough in cattle it’s well known that eating grain/corn will fatten them up and increase the marbling of the meat (I say strange because this is still a fundamental arguing point in humans, and the basis for many low-carbohydate diets). A cow that is fed grain/corn will be high in saturated fat — approximately 80% or so, and will have an omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of about 20:1 (which is bad). A cow that is grass-fed though will have approximately 80% good fats in it, with an omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of less than 1 — how beef was supposed to be.

Luckily for us, we all live in an actual farming community, something that is exceedingly rare these days. So, I’m hoping to start documenting where everyone can get good food in this town. I’ll probably have to modify the site slight to get it to be useful, but I’d like to start showcasing where people can get a) local food b) organic food and c) healthy food, such as grass-fed beef.