Ftrain, by Paul Ford

My friend J-- is mostly done with meat, he tells me. I can see that, meat fading out of your life. For now I can't risk it--I'd fall back into the bed of high-calorie carbs and wake up in the morning having eaten my pillow. But meat every now and then instead of once or twice a day would be a fine thing. Less reliance on the big food systems. Especially if I can have some eggs, eggs from friendly chickens, chickens that have access to clean water and good books and have the opportunity for a college education.

"Big Food vs. Big Insurance," Michael Pollan, the New York Times:

We’re spending $147 billion to treat obesity, $116 billion to treat diabetes, and hundreds of billions more to treat cardiovascular disease and the many types of cancer that have been linked to the so-called Western diet. One recent study estimated that 30 percent of the increase in health care spending over the past 20 years could be attributed to the soaring rate of obesity, a condition that now accounts for nearly a tenth of all spending on health care.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda.

I work for the same magazine where Pollan used to work. For all I know in his old office. He left fifteen years ago, a different era, before the Internet, before death-of-publishing, and now he's everywhere, an industry unto himself, a commentator on the epidemic of poisoned food and on the high cost of fatties. Himself a slend, a very slend, but one with sympathy, tending his vegetables kindly while meditating on corn evil.

I see him in my feeds, some op-ed or analysis, and feel my own ginormity more profoundly. Like me he may have gone down to Han's Deli, but where I chowed mightily at their chicken parm sandwich perhaps he considered the provenance of their bananas. I tucked into the fries at the NoHo Star, ate many a cheap Chinese meal, nibbled from the candy jar. A full and willing participant in Feedbucket USA; the things that I did blindly, succumbing every day to appetite, he considered, observed, analyzed. I would have nothing to teach the man, only things to learn. Unless he wants to migrate his website away from DreamWeaver.

Knowing he was right there, not long ago--it can strip the flavor out of a BLT.

My wife loves him. Has for years. Reads all his books. She does organic container gardening in the concrete backyard. Forty pounds of grapes this year. We tabletop compost. We are permitted to eat the fruit she grows and some of the vegetables, but the leafy greens are riskier due to the benzene and PCBs from the Gowanus Canal. I drew the line at the kitchen worm bin. Sometimes I have to hear about Polyface Farm and chicken tractors. Chickens are important to my wife. "If we buy a house," she says-- somewhere in Brooklyn where houses are less than a few million dollars each-- "we can have chickens."

"They will be noisy," I say.

"That's roosters. We'll get them sexed."

I know that eventually we will have, will have to have, chickens. And Michael Pollan can live in our backyard as well, in a coop. That would make my wife happy. (Update: My wife tells me that Michael Pollan in a coop would not make her happy; he needs to be free-range.)

She is going to enter her squashes in a contest. They are apparently remarkable. 34DDs.

We're boiling lobsters tonight.

Weight: 322.75 lbs