Let's talk more about the ideas discussed in Easy Mark that expose the deceits of food labeling and food fads in general. Here's an example of such deceits.

When you think of agriculture as “co-evolution”, where “clever grasses get us to deforest the world and plant grasses,” agriculture looks very different.

Pollan says he’d always thought of lawns as somewhat conformist and totalitarian, the mower reducing everything to the same size. But now he realizes he’s “a dupe of the lawn,” helping it fight its battle against the trees. He warns that the discussions we’ve had today about ethanol and biofuel shows that “ethanol is the ultimate victory of corn over us, corn bending us to its will.”

hmmm, how did those grasses evolve in the first place? With no lawn mowers or people to plant seed the grasses still did a bang up job of evolving. In fact, humanity lives off grass - maize, rice, wheat, oats and other grains are grass seeds.

There is a coevolution but it is grasses and grazers that in effect have created one another. Grazers are as happy to munch tree seedlings as grasses, and even if they taste nasty can trample them or just rip them off with their marvelous tongues and spit them out. They explore the world with those tongues, and will tear apart most anything they can get to just for entertainment, just screwing around. Never leave anything you value laying around where they can play with it.

He shows us the relationship between just two species - cattle and laying hens. He grazes the cattle in a specific pasture, and keeps them in (and other animals out) using inexpensive electric fencing. Three days after the cows move from the field, he brings in a coop full of laying hens. The 350 hens rush out of the coop and immediately “make a beeline for the cow patties”. The patties are filled with maggots - by waiting three days, they’re fat and juicy for the hens - wait a day more and they hatch as adult flies. The chickens spread out the manure and add their own manure, which is high in nitrogen. The result - the grass grows like crazy and can be used to graze the sheep or make very rich hay.

The farm produces an amazing yield of meat on only 100 acres. It gives lie to the myth that meat cannot be sustainable and that organic meat farming can’t be profitable - the key may be to go far beyond organic and into very complex permaculture.

What do chickens eat? They do like bugs. There's a factual basis for the old saying "faster than a chicken on a June bug". They eat some grass too. Leave a Salatin style chicken tractor in one place for too long and they will leave nothing but bare earth. But mainly they eat maize. Salatin hauls it in by the truckload.

The maize is not organic, that would be too expensive. The grain is more expensive and travels greater distances, an important consideration these days since hauling is expensive too. Either way Salatin is importing fertility to his pastures, robbing some other field of its nutrients to pay his own. This is neither organic nor sustainable.

It is smart, and his products are among the very best. They are the best foods produced in the best ways. And he's happy to have the enviro-nutters who can't understand the issues, much less tell a story straight, tout his wares.

Update:

The subject is different but the insight is similar.

I know I’m banging my head against a brick wall. I know neither side actually gives a flying fuck for real research results or rationality. I know my ravings will not have the slightest influence on anybody. But still, I can’t help it; when I see people on both sides of the house hide their hypocrisy behind a veil of “science” it makes me want to bring a pox down on them all.

Unfortunately, I think that Jeremy's Kool-Aid dose was too high.

I’m back where I always am on these questions: informed choice. And by informed, I don’t mean scientifically informed. I mean given the information to exercise a choice. Labeling remains the answer. Compulsory labeling, with no weasel outs. When the gene jockeys have something they want me (as opposed to a farmer) to pay more for, you can bet they’ll want to tout its benefits. In the meantime, they keep their doings hidden from the ultimate decision-makers, the people who have to swallow the stuff.

There's a false assumption here that labeling provides the information for informed choice. It does not, no matter how complete. Fill a room with real experts and they will have good phun giving one another noogies about the meaning of the labels and the significance for people, the planet, the girl, the gold watch and everything.

There simply are no simple solutions. Every intervention will be gamed since they provide such powerful incentives to do so. Head banging will continue.