omnivory

i just finished The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I want everyone to read it. Some parts are scary, about our industrial food system and how bad it is for us, the animals, and the ecosystem, and some parts are incredibly thought-provoking, exploring the nature of the relationship between an organism and its food. there is a good deal of discussion of ignorance versus enlightenment (not with a capital E, just in terms of where your food comes from and its true cost). i think it's worth everyone's time to read it, since everyone eats.
now i'm starting Deep Economy, on mom and dad's recommendation. i think i'll love this one too.
i spent a while yesterday trolling the Slow Foods websites, trying to find a job opportunity ... unfortunately it's still too small to be hiring unskilled, inexperienced folks like me ... but i want to help!!!

last night i helped my friend Rachel cook some chicken. We made an *awesome* dinner of chicken roasted in the pan with butternut squash, fingerling potatoes, sweet potato, onions, and garlic. the winner of this meal was Adam's Christmas Italian rub - i'd never rubbed meat before, but it did a wonderful job. the chicken was wonderfully juicy and imbued everything else with a lovely herby, salty butteriness. And i felt okay about the chicken, my first in ... at least a year, probably more, as it was pasture-raised, organic, and hormone-free. while i have no guarantee that this chicken had a high-quality, happy life, it sure tasted like it. chicken is the one meat that never tempts me to break vegetarianism, as i'm much more of a red-meat girl (and bacon, ooh, bacon) but this was certainly an enjoyable chicken.
It bears mentioning that Rachel shares many of my views on animals and the consumption thereof, and was vegetarian for a long while (vegan, for a small bit), but has since given up vegetarianism in the interest of her own health - her body has dictated her omnivory in no uncertain terms. she, like Michael Pollan is urging us to (both in Omnivore's Dilemma and in his latest, In Defense of Food), tries to consider where her meat is coming from and make very deliberate decisions based on maximizing the nutritional value of what she consumes while minimizing the environmental and societal degradation of that food's production. i find it easier to stick to vegetables. although, as people occasionally point out, vegetarians are contributing to animal death as well, if you count all of the small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and ground-nesting birds that meet their doom in the teeth of crop harvesters, not to mention the loss of life from "pest-control" regimes, not to mention the habitat loss from conversion of woods, prairies, wetlands, whatever, to croplands.
everything's a tradeoff. but i prefer to know these things and think about these things and then decide to keep eating, rather than live in ignorance while the carpet is pulled out from under me.