I finally got around to reading Michael
Pollan's excellent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History
of Four Meals. It goes on my list of books that everyone should
read. It paints a disturbing picture of the modern industrial food
system, that is now up there with global warming on my list of
things to worry about. But the book is hopeful too. The system can
be fixed, and the movement to fix it is growing. One of the
advantages of living near San Francisco is that this is an area
where a lot of folks concerned about this problem are active. There
are a lot of paradoxes to sort out: the human population of the
planet has become immense, and it's not clear that sustainable
healthy techniques can feed us all.