Finished music. Didn't finish book.

[bunrab]

OK, the piece of music is done and printed out - I'll let you all know more about it if we manage to play it during rehearsal tonight and it sounds OK.

Haven't had time to finish Omnivore's Dilemma and I have to return it to library. A few quick quotes, though:

The growth of the American food industry will always bump up against this troublesome biological fact: Try as we might, each of us can eat only about fifteen hundred pounds of food a year. Unlike many products - CDs, say, or shoes - there's a natural limit to how much we food we can each consume without exploding. What this means for the food industry is that its natural rate of growth is somewhere around 1 percent per year - 1 percent being the annual growth rate of the American population. The problem is that 1 percent will never satisfy Wall Street, which demands at the very least a 10 percent return on its capital.

And chapter 6, which shows that the problem of surplus corn is not new - in the early 1800's, a surplus of corn led to a plague of alcoholism based on cheap corn whiskey, much like today's plague of obesity based on cheap high fructose corn syrup.

Before the changes in lifestyle, before the clever marketing, comes the mountain of cheap corn. Corn accounts for most of the surplus calories we're growing and most of the surplus calories we're eating. ... In the 1820's the processing options were basically two: You could turn your corn into pork or alcohol. Today, there are hundreds of things a processor can do with corn: They can use it to make everything from chicken nuggets and Big Macs to emulsifiers and nutraceuticals. Yet since the human desire for sweetness surpasses even our desire for intoxication, the cleverest thing to do with a bushel of corn is to refine it into thirty-three pounds of high-fructose corn syrup.

And from the section on "industrial organic farming," wherein we learn that the "organic" growers are the same military-industrial complex, growth at all costs:

Grain is the closest thing in nature to an industrial commodity: storable, portable, fungible, ever the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Since it can be accumulated and traded, grain is a form of wealth. It is a weapon, too, as Earl Butz once had the bad taste to mention in public; the nation with the biggest surpluses of grain have always exerted power over the ones in short supply.

This section also explains a LOT about the recent contaminated spinach episode!

From the section where he's on a real organic farm, killing chickens by hand:

I wasn't at it long enough for slaughtering chickens to become routine, but the work did begin to feel mechanical, and that feeling, perhaps more than any other, was disconcerting: how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it. IN a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling.

OK, enough quotes. Off to the library.