Michael Pollan on local gardening and cooking -

"It's funny to think of something as domestic as cooking and gardening as subversive, but it is. It is the beginning of taking back control from a system that would much rather do everything for you. The food industry wants to cook for you, shop for you, they want to do everything but digest for you and if they could figure out a way to do that profitably, they would. It's all about making money. They need to convince you that you can't do this stuff on your own. That gardening is hard, growing your own food is old-fashioned. Cooking is just so hard, we have to cook for you.

I think it's really an important thing to do. The fact is we've had 50 years of letting corporations cook our meals, and it appears now that they were not doing a very good job of it. The food they're cooking is making people sick. It is one of the reasons that we have the obesity and diabetes epidemics that we do. And it's not surprising because they do not take as much care of our health and welfare as our parents do when they cook for us.

If you're going to let industries decide how much salt, sugar and fat is in your food, they're going to put as much as they possibly can. Why? Because they want to sell as much of it as they possibly can and we are hard-wired to like sugar, fat and salt. They will push those buttons until we scream or die. That's in the nature of things. If you want to sell a lot of products, you make it as appealing as possible, but that's not the same as cooking with an eye toward our health. We have responsibility for our health. We shouldn't expect them to look out for us. And indeed, they don't."

"After thousands of years, we have invented the one diet that makes people sick and rejected the thousands of diets that make them healthy. How did that happen? Well, it's hard to make money on those traditional diets. We're programmed to like refined grain, sugars and fats."

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Toban Black
(http://tobanblack.net/blog/)