industrial agriculture

The book CAFO - The Tragedy of Industrial Agricultural Factories, sits in my basement bookshelf, in a place where I'm confident my kids won't notice it. It's not that the book is gruesome; a book on the subject of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) could easily have been more bloody. And it's not that my kids don't know the difference between "happy meat" and Happy Meals. Maybe it's simply the fact that the terrific book CAFO -- all 300 gigantic, photo-filled pages of it -- shows a side of human nature that I'm still trying to protect my elementary schoolers from. A side that I, like many others, would prefer to keep in the basement -- just out of reach of children.

Namedropping Michael Pollan isn't likely to bring you much insider food cred these days. If you think about good, real, local, organic, sustainable, fresh, tasty, whole food - heck, if you've watched "Oprah" lately - then you've probably already heard the name Michael Pollan more times just this week than you can count. When "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was published in 2006, many of us were just starting to think about the amount of corn we were consuming.

Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals" is one of my favorite food books ever. I don't agree with everything it says, but the book is so incredibly compelling, the arguments so well reasoned, and the descriptions so very vivid, that I recommend it to anyone who is thinking seriously about our food and where it comes from.

Early in the book, Safran Foer takes great pains to describe why we should be eating dogs. He even goes so far as to provide a "classic Filipino" recipe. Here's a small excerpt:

Today’s post is the final half of a two-part interview with Curt Ellis (the first part of our "Big River" article is here), who will be in Minneapolis this week showing “Big River,” a companion to his 2006 documentary “King Corn.” Both films will be screened at the Riverview Theater on Wednesday, November 18 at 7:00, with a panel discussion afterwards. Admission is $10.