The Omnivore's Dilemma

This is a great book on a timely, important topic. Here are some key points I've gleaned from it.

• Processed food is a supply-driven business but it has to deal with the problem of the "fixed stomach" - that is, food consumption, unlike computers or clothes, is biologically limited by the size of our guts. So, in order to make profits, the industry must either (a) get people to spend more on the same number of calories (the Whole Foods approach) or getting people to eat more (the General Mills and McDonald's approach).
• Super-sizing has been a way to get people to spend more money. However, studies has shown that mammals over-eat when presented with the opportunity because they (we) are evolutionarily designed to feast when food is available to tide through the next famine. We are programmed to respond most readily to high-energy substances like fat and sugar, because fatty, sweet things provided our ancestors with the biggest caloric bang for the hunting or gathering.
• High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was invented in 1980. It is not found naturally in any food, but its constituents, fructose and glucose are naturally occurring sugars. It is very sweet and a source of highly-dense calories. As such we respond very strongly to it, but our sensory apparatus is not well designed to appreciate the calorie load in HFCS because it is not found in whole food. It teases our taste buds and tricks our guts.
  
• HFCS has found its way into nearly every processed food item. At the same time the average caloric intake in the US has increased 10% (about 200 calories) per day, while calorie expenditure (work and exercise) has remained level or even decreased. Those 200 calories a day end up in fat cells around our waists and hips. We now have an obesity and diabetes epidemic due to consumption of energy-dense processed foods.
  
• A family meal at McDonald's of 4510 calories requires 10 times as many calories to produce (raising the corn, raising the beef, processing the foods, reconstituting them, transportation). That's 1.3 gallons of oil!
  
• Food processing is an irrational use of energy: it involves taking natural whole foods and braking them down into constituent chemicals which are then reassembled into a new products.
  
• There is a 90% loss of energy each move up the food chain, say from grass, to cow, to carnivore. That's why there's a lot more plants than predators in a given ecosystem. In other words only 10% of the calories of grass (or corn) a cow eats go into making tissue (meat) that we eat, while rest goes to keeping the animal alive or is excreted as waste. This inefficiency is why eating meat - especially cows - is environmentally costly. A more sustainable diet is eating (more often) lower on the food chain where we are able to reap the energy from the sun in the most efficient manner - directly from plants.
• Cows have been taken from their natural habitat - a grassland - and placed in cow-cities, feedlots, where they are fed corn (not their natural diet) and wallow in their own excrement. This is the cheapest way to make meat. But overcrowding and an unnatural diet make the cows sick (just like occurs in human slums), so they are routinely treated with large quantities of medicine and hormones which, when excreted, leach into the soil and contaminate nearby water supplies.
• Farmers have always this problem: they make good money during famines because of high prices, and loose money in boom years because of low prices. Unlike consumer products which are driven by demand, agriculture is usually driven by supply: the price of wheat is determined by the bounty rather than the demand for it. To ease the burden of unpredictability in this market, the government provides subsidies so that farmers are guaranteed an income when prices fall below costs. But this just encourages farmers to produce more crop (for greater profits), which results in surplus and even lower market price. The end result is that taxpayers are subsidizing overproduction. The market as found ways of using this surplus: feeding us more and exporting the rest. It is economically irrational.

Food should be protected from capitalist ventures because there is little, if any, room for innovating things that evolution has already mastered.

Eating "organic" food is not as important as eating whole, unprocessed food. A good maxim is: if your grandmother doesn't recognize an ingredient then don't eat it.