Frankenfood

Although I've never read Frederik Pohl's The Space Merchants, I have enough sci-fi exposure to be familiar with his "Chicken Little", a "huge mass of cultured chicken breast... kept alive by algae... skimmed from multistory towers of ponds" and used as the people's primary food source. (quotes conveniently located here)

Scum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people... From The Space Merchants, by Frederik Poh

I used to think things like that were just disgusting science fiction. Then I started to read the news.

We knew GM corn was a bad idea - who could have imagined they'd make it even worse by adding the H1N1 vaccine to the mix?!

We knew the Bible said not to eat meat sacrificed to a pagan god, but what modern person living in America actually thought that would be something we'd ever to be concerned about? (Incidentally, as much as I agree with the need for better food labeling, things like this make me seriously wonder if its even possible to completely and accurately label food using anything larger than size 3 font!) Just another reason to buy locally from people you know as much as humanly possible!

And, just for fun, check out what's actually in your "normal" and "healthy" everyday menu items. :0)