Do You Know What You Eat?

Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Troy Duster, Elizabeth Ransom, Winona LaDuke, Peter Singer, Dr. Vandana Shiva, Carlo Petrini, Eliot Coleman & Jim Hightower recently participated in a Nation forum: One Thing to Do About Food. Here are a few excerpts - go read the whole thing:

"Once you learn how our modern industrial food system has transformed what most Americans eat, you become highly motivated to eat something else."

"....the American food system is a game played according to a precise set of rules that are written by the federal government with virtually no input from anyone beyond a handful of farm-state legislators. Nothing could do more to reform America's food system--and by doing so improve the condition of America's environment and public health--than if the rest of us were suddenly to weigh in."

"There is one very simple thing that everyone can do to fix the food system. Don't buy factory-farm products."

"Corporate control thrives on monocultures. Citizens' food freedom depends on biodiversity."

"Industry and the production ethos have robbed people of the knowledge of food and reduced it to pure merchandise--a good to be consumed like any other."

"An addiction to treating the symptoms of problems rather than correcting their causes is an unwise choice made by our society as a whole."

"In the very short span of about fifty years, we've allowed our politicians to do something remarkably stupid: turn America's food-policy decisions over to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and economists. These are people who could not run a watermelon stand if we gave them the melons and had the Highway Patrol flag down the customers for them--yet, they have taken charge of the decisions that direct everything from how and where food is grown to what our children eat in school."

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