A RETURN TO INNOCENCE

Because the Master of the House is a devotee of the Food Channel, the recurring 21st century theme in our house is,"What shall we cook tonight?" My nasty response:"Why not re-visit Mrs. Paul's Famous Frozen Fish Fries?" She saved many a day alternating with Hamburger Helper as we shuffled between Little League baseball and ballet lessons.

So I bit the bullet and surreptitiously stuffed Mrs. Paul into my think-green food bag at the supermarket.

Let's say that Mrs. Paul will have to struggle to share a spot on TV with the Barefoot Contessa, Lidia Bastianich or Tyler Florence, The Mr. Ultimate.

Maybe Paula Dean can whip up a southern potion and give Mrs. Paul a makeover!

Sincerely: Frustrated Former Cooking Teacher

REVIEW: “FOOD, INC.”- The Movie

Have you read “Fast Food Nation’ by Eric Schossler (2001) or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” (2006) by Michael Pollan? Schossler exposed the travesties in the fast food industry and made all of us nervous eating a burger at MacDonalds. Pollan picked up the ball and wrote a powerful book indicting corn as the evildoer as engineered by the American food industry.

Pollan’s book was made into a documentary film, “Food, Inc.” and is an angry blast at the food industry.

Corn seems to be the culprit. It’s not relegated to feeding chickens, cows and fish. In one guise or another, it has seeped into candy, soft drinks and cheese and may be directly responsible for the obesity problem America faces today.

Corn is fed to chickens and cows and unless we can grow free-range chickens and grass-fed cows we’re eating corn as that roast chicken or that steak dinner. Corn has infiltrated a vast variety of foods in a typical supermarket.

Some of the footage in the film (largely shot surreptitiously by workers) shows how poultry and livestock are raised. Chickens are kept in long, dark, stifling sheds, where they stand in their own waste and fatted with corn and then on to slaughter in a mere forty-nine days. Cows are jammed together in huge pens eating corn, not grass, disrupting their digestive systems.

Corn has pigeonholed low income Americans into eating affordable fast food burgers because they can’t afford fresh vegetables.

The film is unnerving and cries out to the food industry to enact the necessary legislation to protect all Americans from the travesty of corn.