Half Past Noon

This has to be posted, because it’s getting a lot of play in my conversational life and I’m worried I’ll end up repeating it too much:

…the parallels are easy. Compare public schooling in the 70s to the industrial food system now.

They are both monolithic. People can’t imagine anything else.
We subsidize both of them extensively with our tax-dollars, whether we participate in them or not.
To opt-out of them we’d need to at first develop our own systems (ala homeschooling) until we develop communal systems (ala local Christian schools)
There is a growing secular critique of the system (that led to an explosion of parochial schools)
There are faithful Christians participating in the system, and faithful Christians opting out.
It takes a few logical steps to bring the Bible to bear on the issue.
It’s not just about one system, it’s about broad, far-reaching Biblical principles.

Can you think of any more? And how to we bring the lessons of the Christian schooling issue to bear with this second-generation issue?

It should be noted that these comparisons address virtually every argument I’ve had with a defacto proponent of our current food system.

Chicken grinder, no. This: yes, and yes. I’m very impressed.

Reason #439 Why I Wish I Could Vote for Obama:

Remember Michael Pollan’s article to the future “Farmer-in-chief”? Obama’s already read it:

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen [sic] about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

Well, Kate’s going to be in Spokane tomorrow evening around dinner time. Thankfully, I found this inspirational story about Brad Sciullo, my new hero, who ate a 20.2 pound burger over 4 hours and 39 minutes. I’m hungry.