One of the things I have found amazing is the failure of food manufacturers to take the blame for American obesity, even mounting a recent ad campaign advocating corn syrup as harmless. Another is the unbelievable amount of sodium in our processed food, especially canned foods. Now we have prophylactic antibiotics for cattle and poultry; who knows the long-term harm of these things? And the melamine found in pet foods imported from China has now found it's way into BABY FORMULA! We need to not only support our local food coops; we need more of them, with a straight line from farm to table. We need pesticide-free and chemical fertilizer-free foods. We need to get the fluoride out of our water. And we need to stop government subsidies to BIG AGRIBUSINESS. Also, if possible, we need to grow as much of our own food as we can. Thank goodness for the Internet; there is a wealth of information available. And, thank you, Jim, for pointing out what we all know needs to be done--get back to the land.

Absolutely right, Floridatexan and Jim! But with these parlous hard times on us, we have to make sure that this good food is affordable - Whole Foods is likely to lose a lot of business if people can't afford to buy its premium-priced goodies.

If we have a lot of unemployed people, shouldn't it be possible to spark some organized movement to make them into small farmers, perhaps on abandoned urban land? Look at Flint, Michigan, where so many houses are abandoned that the city is bulldozing them to prevent their becoming drug and gang dens - all that land available, with the water infrastructure to serve it, and all those unemployed auto workers looking for something useful to do - you'd think someone could organize it. Probably easier in a milder climate, of course, but there's no shortage of unemployment and foreclosure in the warmer midwest and the south.