It's the Happy Meal...OF DEATH

I've been reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, a look at the many business practices in which the fast food industry (from restaurants to suppliers to farmers/ranchers) engages in order to deliver a consistent product, keep labor costs low, and maximize profits. (An interesting review appears online at Salon.) The entire book is disturbing, but nothing is quite so fear-provoking to a mother as the description of a 7-year-old boy's death after ingesting an e coli tainted hamburger. I now find myself flinching whenever I pass a McDonalds. But how does one raise a child in today's America without the occasional fast food visit? Very carefully.

Schlosser's description of how "natural flavorings" are added to food was particularly interesting. Apparently, so much of what we believe is flavor in processed foods is just a smoke-and-mirrors chemical reaction that fools your olfactory senses into believing that what you are tasting is cheesy goodness. I find that I'm spending more time carefully reading food labels to try and figure out whether certain products actually contain any real food at all.

In the past, I've been known to make some pretty drastic dietary moves to improve my health or body image (near-vegetarianism, South Beach Diet, etc.). I'm trying to eat mostly fresh vegetables and whole grains. But I think the most important thing to do right now is to stay away from anything that might kill me.