Here's Wikipedia's summary of the great Charlton Heston movie, "Soylent Green:"

If you are what you eat -- a dubious proposition -- then does what you eat say something about how you will vote? More important, does your choice of adult beverage have some political significance?

Michael Pollan has been making me think about my food for a long time. Back in 2002, he wrote an article for the New York Times magazine describing his experience of buying a young steer and following it through its entire life -- all the way to a feedlot in western Kansas. There wasn't much in the article that was surprising to me -- I live in Kansas after all, I've helped make sausage, and my father once worked at a meatpacking plant -- until I got to this nugget of information:

This isn't good:

When I was poking around the Web earlier for interesting takes on today's obesity topic, I sent an e-mail to my friend Mike Fumento, asking if he'd seen the L.A. Times story we linked to. Mike wrote an excellent book 10 years ago called The Fat of the Land, which was one of the first to tackle the politics, prescriptions and personalities surrounding America's obesity epidemic. He's kept abreast of the subject ever since. Here is Mike's reply, which he graciously gave me permission to post here