Wisdom for young minds

I had lunch with my son the other day.  He's 18 years old, and he lives with his girlfriend.  He just found a job busing tables, and she is going to find a job soon--when she turns 18.  We spoke about how large food companies work to prevent people from being able to identify what is in their food.  How nobody would buy pork from hog farms if they were connected to the suffering of the pig.

Everyone should have a pig.  We should have pigs instead of landfills.  Imagine if we got rid of plastic bags, and had a pig in the back yard.  Instead of scraping our plates into the garbage, we would put the extra into a bucket and feed it to the pig, who would then, in turn, make fertilizer for our vegetable gardens.  This used to be what people did.  I remember stories from my father about how they had some farm animals on the property where my mother lives now.  A ritzy section of Coconut Grove has grown up around it, and so there is not a chicken or a cow or a pig to be found.

Instead, we get our food from the grocery store, where it comes from.  Food is born in plastic styrofoam trays with plastic wrap over the top and a sell by date on it.  Where does it come from?  How was it grown?  What hormones and antibiotics were used to enable the creature to survive it's filthy living conditions?  How much did it suffer?  These questions are never asked.  That is because the food comes from big farms with big gates that are a long way off.  The advertising has pictures of happy pigs and neat slogans like "the other white meat," but we truly have no contact with our food.

It comes that way precisely so we do not have this information.  People would feel very uncomfortable if they knew about udder puss.  Udder puss is the infectious slime that gets into milk when you have dairy cows in completely disgusting unnatural conditions.  To prevent udder puss from developing into a dangerous infection that could reduce milk production, they pump the cows full of antibiotics.  What kind of antibiotics?  Who cares!  right?  And to increase production further, they give the cows loads of hormones, so their cow bodies think they have a really urgent need to make a whole bunch of milk.  And by doing all this, we can sell a gallon of milk for less than it costs to make a gallon of gasoline.

And so there is a movement out there somewhere to start knowing where your food comes from.  There is another movement to label our food.  But why would we want that?  It's unnecessary! right?  That's what big food wants you to think.

But if we knew, if we cared, if we were awake, we would do something about it.  We would buy eggs from chickens who had not spent their entire lives in agony.  We would by chickens from the neighborhood farm, where chickens live in chicken coups and walk around in the yard and eat bugs and other stuff that chickens eat.  And some chicken food too.  We would feed them, but a nice balanced chicken diet.  The chickens would lay some  brown eggs with firm shells, and we would eat them.  They might cost a bit more.  They might cost fifty cents an egg.  Fifty cents.  That means you could have a really good three egg omelette for about a buck fifty.  That's pretty reasonable right?

But that's not what we do.  We pay $1.29 a dozen for eggs from chickens that live in hell, eat garbage, and are pumped full of drugs.

I know I know, this is a rant.  But it's true.  We should know where our food comes from.  We should treat animals humanely.  We should not be so embarrassed by what goes on in our farms that we will not allow the public to see what goes on.  We should not put stuff in our food that food companies do not want to label.

So my son was taken aback by this.  Really he had no idea that the mission of the food industry was to take crap, package it in shiney wrappers, fill it with high fructose corn syrup and other poisons and then sell this garbage to us.

My son said, someone should write a book about this.  Someone should write a book for young people with the truth in it, so we will know about it.

That's what I'm going to do.  I'm going to start right now.  This is the book.  It's free. It's true.  If ever I get any money from it, I'm going to use it to support the rain forest.