"Some informed observers now believe Big Meat’s days are numbered. In an article titled “The Slavery of Our Time,” Foreign Policy predicted that worldwide meat consumption will go into a tailspin starting by 2025. Meanwhile, straight out of cattle country’s Midwestern base, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune sought to open a national dialog about the ethics of food. And Princeton ethics professor Peter Singer called for an end to factory farming, as well as a 50 percent tax on meat. A similar tax had been proposed a few months earlier by The Urban Institute.
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As the evidence mounted linking livestock—especially cows—to global warming, agribusiness did what it does best: lobbied government. In January, the EPA decided that factory farms and feedlots would not have to tell anyone when they released illegal levels of gases into the air. And in September, California released a plan to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Businesses of every stripe were affected by California’s plan, but agribusiness was specifically exempted.
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Fresh evidence emerged about the grim state of the world’s fisheries, with a team of experts calling for closing one-third of the world’s oceans to fishing for the next twenty years.
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An Associated Press report concluded that 87 million Americans are stricken with food poisoning each year, with 325,000 people requiring hospitalization, and 5000 deaths. Food safety remained an issue that could be essentially solved, given determined industry action—action the industry sought to avoid at all costs.
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Unfortunately, almost none of the resultant media coverage bothered to mention that the [swine flu] was conclusively traced to factory farms, and would therefore never have emerged without the existence of the pork industry."

"low-effort ideas for ‘edible wall’:
* Make a garden out of a hanging shoe rack.
* Grow vegetables in reclaimed gutters.
* Build a wooden garden-box to mount vertically.
* Buy or make some of these “wall pockets” for growing plants.
* Invest in a vertical garden system from ELT Easy Green."

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Pollan: I think what’s about to happen, if we get this health care bill passed, and there are some kind of minimal rules, no more pre-existing conditions, they can’t throw you off the plan, they have to take you–suddenly, the health insurers will have an interest in your health that they don’t have now.

Stewart: That may be the worst sentence I’ve ever heard said! “Suddenly, the health insurers will have an interest in your health. Which, right now, they don’t.”

Pollan: Their business plan, now, is to keep you out of their business plan, if you’re likely to get chronic disease. And the Western diet creates a lot of chronic disease. Right now, the food industry creates patients for the health care industry; they have a very sympathetic relationship. But that might change. And, I think if that changes, you will see this very powerful industry getting on board with this growing national movement to reform the food system.

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After spending several years trying to answer the supposedly incredibly complicated question of how we should eat in order to be maximally healthy, I discovered the answer was shockingly simple: eat real food, not too much of it, and more plants than meat. Or, put another way, get off the modern western diet, with its abundance of processed food, refined grains and sugars, and its sore lack of vegetables, whole grains and fruit…

#11 Avoid foods you see advertised on television
#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t
#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk
#39 Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself

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