On my way to a golf tournament in Sun Valley, Idaho, I passed mile after mile of potato fields and thought about a book, "The Botany of Desire" by Michael Pollan.

One of the chapters is about the potato industry and the 14 applications of pesticide that go into those spuds. After one particularly virulent poison is applied to fight pests, no human being can be allowed to walk onto the field for five days --- even for an emergency repair on those huge rolling irrigation systems. Potato farmers, some of whom are farming more than 3,000 acres of potatoes, will only eat those they grow naturally in their own vegetable gardens.

How can we expect to live long enough to enjoy a hard-earned retirement if the food industry is trying to kill us? A friend who just returned from Scotland said that his cattle-farming host had pointed out that antibiotics in cattle were banned in Britain 14 years ago. Meanwhile in South Korea, people are rioting as the country lifts the ban on U.S. beef. What do they know? Are we like sheep to some slaughter?

The story with the meat processing industry is that it has been dramatically consolidated from lots of small farms into giant industrial complexes that grow cattle and hogs as fast as possible. Massive doses of antibiotics are the only hope for keeping these animals alive long enough to slaughter.

And then there are those "free-range" chickens. Apparently, to earn this designation for its fowl, a chicken processor has only to make available an open fenced-in area at the end of a large chicken "coop." Unfortunately, for those of us who would like to think we are eating chickens that got a lot of fresh air and sunshine in place of antibiotics, the chickens tend not to want to go outside. They like to hang out with a few thousand of their friends --- inside.

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