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“There are a lot of Food Luddites (to borrow a term coined by Steve Forbes), who are intent on destroying the largest, most efficient food producing machine the world has ever had. “

I was eating at McDonalds with an artsy woman from an art-type community in Arizona. She said in horror that margarine was an “industrial product.” I starting counting off the things we ate that are also industrial products. She was aghast. According to my MBA research not a single chain restaurant makes its own food. Almost every meal is factory made, flash frozen and shipped. Think about the fancy stuffed shrimp you get at Red Lobster. Do you really think they made them onsite in twenty minutes? Just about every restaurant uses the McDonald’s factory model or they aren’t in business for long. An employee of one of the big meat processors told me that the firm “harvested” 12 million chickens a day, from farms that are individually owned. Those chickens are genetically engineered, fed a scientific diet and filled with hormones to bring them to market weight in the most expeditious, cost effective manner possible. That is why chicken is still dirt cheap. Can you imagine what chicken would cost if it was all “free range?”

If we went entirely to boutique foods our entire budget would be consumed by food and we’d still starve. God bless the mass farmers and factory workers who feed 330 million Americans and probably half of the world every day.