Tangential Tuesday - Off to the Oregon Coast

Tomorrow, Mark and I are going off on a Tangent.  This trip is a little tangent to our 'get up and make the coffee and turn on the computer' lives right now.  Mark has been having an affair with his new job these past few months, staring intently at his computer screen for hours on end, whispering sweet nothings to his new trophy wife - the gleaming and angular Mac Book Pro with 14" screen.  Oh, I occasionally get a wink or a peck on the cheek now and then, but usually it takes the smell of frying sausage from the kitchen to pull him away from his mistress.  

He needs a little vacation, and though I feel a little guilty for saying it, I think I need one too.  Not as if I've been working the 9 to 5 racket very much these days... but I have been working.  The click-clack of my computer can be heard fairly loudly at 8am, when I'm dashing off cover letters to jobs.  When I haven't been calling and networking and job searching, I've found other ways to feel like I have some purpose on this earth, proving to myself that my life IS in order... really.  So I straighten and clean and reorganize the closet.  I wash linens that haven't been washed in ages, I water the tiny garden, and every 10 minutes between activities I check email. God forbid should a response come in from Dream Job when my back is turned, dusting the salt and pepper shakers!  

So maybe I need a vacation from my neuroses.  

When Mark suggested a getaway down the Oregon Coast, there's no way I could say no.  I tore through my books and binders and pulled out the travel article, ripped from the Seattle Times last summer, chronicling an adventure full of sand, suds, and surf.  We'll camp and do morning runs on the beach, hang at the local pubs and sample Oregon's famous microbrews... follow lunch with a beach hike and then eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the campfire.  I so need an adventure.  Getting away and getting some perspective wouldn't hurt either. 

We've decided, ahem.. okay so maybe I've decided to tack on some time with the grape juice at the end of the trip.  He gets his brews, I get my grapes.  The Willamette Valley just outside of Portland is home to some famous Pinot Noirs, so why not jog over and experience the wine life?  If you've ever been to this area and have some must-see suggestions, I'd love to know your thoughts.

We'll be back from our crazy Tangent on Sunday, and I'll be sure to post some photos and, of course, tell you all about the brews and the grapes.  Oh yeah, and maybe I'll mention the sand and wildlife too. 

Berries and Life

Life is like picking thimbleberries.  Or maybe, my life has felt like a bowl of thimbleberries lately.  Until about a month ago, I had no idea what thimbleberries were, and now I think I can find in them some sort of metaphor for what life feels like right now. 

This spring, in the vast expanse (for urban living, we consider it vast) of our yard, out perched on the cliff-like edges of our little private hilltop, are seemingly hundreds of bushes that cling on for dear life.  With leaves that look like maple, and berries that could pass for raspberries to some girl who doesn’t know the difference, they reach up and up the hillside, climbing and growing, toeing their way onto the lawn.  Every few days I have to pull thimbleberry starts that spring up in random places, green, happy and defiant in the middle of patches of brown prickly grass.  Plants thrive where they’re meant to, they grow best where they’re supposed to.  The grass is obviously misplaced, but the thimbleberry, well, they know where they belong.  Somehow I’ve managed this past month to plant a tiny patch of vegetables right next to those monster knots of thimbleberry.  In the sandy soil, I put down a few heirloom tomato plants, a few basil and six dinosaur kale.  I couldn’t tell right away if they too, were going to feel misplaced… because the sagebushes next door are smiling, the oregano is a wild little beast, but what seems to grow best in my sandy little patch are thimbleberries.  I pull a few thimbleberry babies each day, reaching up from beneath the soil to take up residence in this benevolent place.   

I go out to pick the thimbleberry’s little red dome-shaped fruit.  Each one I pick yields easily to my fingers.  They are perfectly round, and hollow inside, like thimbles.  Their soft structure collapses as soon as you drop it into your picking bowl.  So small, a half hour’s work is about two cups.  Now I know how the saffron gatherers must feel.  Slow progress, and your fingertips stain fuschia red.  Leaning in to pick the biggest ones, they easily rub their redness into your shirt, your forearms, the color of fake Halloween blood.  Coming back into the house after picking, Mark takes one look at me with wide eyes and begins laughing hysterically.  “I know” I say with a sly smile, “I look as though I’ve come out of a thimbleberry horror movie.” 

The berries were a mound of mush in my bowl, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with them, so I plopped them into the blender with some vanilla ice cream and milk, and made a thimbleberry shake.  It was so sweet and a bit tart, with thousands of tiny seeds, crunching like poppy seeds, and the color was bright party pink (Mark said it looked like I was drinking Pepto-Bismol, but I ignored him.)

This past month, I have found myself fighting pretty hard.  I’m the kind of person who, when faced with certain circumstances, either thinks her way out of them with creative problem-solving, or else fights her way out with sheer pavement-pounding hard work.  So when I find myself these days with circumstances that require both creative problem-solving and sheer hard work, I put myself to the task – and it is all-consuming.  For weeks I was running on overdrive, juggling assignments and job hunting and working and with help from some divine force, keeping us both well fed.  I felt overwhelmed as I ended one part of my life as a dietetic intern and entered another as a job hunter.  I worried, and fretted, and worried some more, because I think sometimes that worrying is what I do best.  I began fighting against what was put on my plate, feeling pressure to find a job and pressure to find a job to hold me over until I find a real job.  I wasn’t doing much berry picking, and downtime never felt like anything other than time when ‘I should be doing something productive.’  But now, after my fight has fought itself into exhaustion, and I’m finally beginning to accept what life is giving me, I’m picking thimbleberries.

They grow best where the soil feels right to them.  Their presence on our hillside is neither good nor bad, it just is.  They are there because they grow best there.  Unlike my little patch of struggling vegetables, the thimbleberries aren’t fighting very hard against their circumstances.  I’ve been given what I’ve been given, and I can either smile and work it out, or make life hard, resisting and struggling against it.  Being upset about this part of my journey is like being upset with the berries as they stain my fingers with their juice.  To get what you want, you have to get your hands a little dirty. 

We all somehow feel as though it’s necessary to judge things and people and situations as either good or bad, but maybe it isn’t.  Maybe it’s all just berry juice.

 

Upcoming Workshop at 5 Focus

Wanted to let you know about my upcoming workshop at 5 Focus integrative center on June 7th.  I'd love to see you!

From Chocolate to Kale…

Spruce up your summer with new foods on your plate!

Sunday, June 7^th

2 - 3:30p.m.

Cost: $30 –food samples included!

 

·    Are you tired of your food routine? 

·    Love shopping at organic markets but can’t pronounce or identify many of the foods on the shelves? 

·     Are you curious about quinoa, kale, or other ‘exotic’ grains, vegetables, and natural sweeteners?

Join Bastyr-educated nutritionist Christine Weiss for a lively and tasty class on demystifying the many healthful ingredients found in natural food stores.  Christine will discuss the health benefits of kefir, agave nectar, buckwheat and other foods that can liven up meals and snacks.  You’ll also have a chance to taste a variety of products new to your palate – traditional socca made with chickpea flour, homemade ginger root tea and an energy bar made with almond butter and maple syrup.  Go home with new flavors and new recipes for a new healthy start.

Christine received her MS in Nutrition from Bastyr University in 2008 and is currently a dietetic intern at Sea Mar Community Health Center.  She has a passion for food and wine, which she shares with her students as a culinary instructor for PCC Cooks.

For more information or to register, please call 206.631.2818 or visit www.5focus.com

How to Roast a Chicken

I really never thought I'd be doing this but, lately I've been roasting chickens.  I've never considering myself the 'throw the hunk of meat in the oven and shut the door' kind of gal.  I mean, it wasn't that long ago that I considered myself a completely raw vegan.  Yeah, it's a bit of a leap, but lately I've been roasting chickens.  I suppose you learn a lot about food and even more about yourself when you go through 3+ years of nutrition education.  Juice it or eat it whole?  Got milk or got propaganda?  Honey or sucanat?  Eat meat or go veg? Along the way you confront those decisions, one by one.  Along the way you make those little decisions as they come to you, and before you know it you're eating entirely differently than you did before.  Stripped of your bias, your political proselytizing, your internet heresay, you have yourself a new outlook on food - and hopefully on cooking too.  

After years of taking a hard look at my food, and years of loving an omnivore (I say omni, because I finally got him to eat broccoli) I've made a bit of peace, and some subtle compromises, with my choices. 

Clarification: now I'm roasting organic chickens.

I still don't eat beef, and my meat intake continues to be much less than the average Jane, but I have a hungry guy to feed (and I'm usually pretty hungry too).  So I turn on the oven, slap that chicken onto the roasting pan, and call it dinner.  I feel... so... so... wifey.  Yes, I know how to make roast chicken for my man, and I can still be a confident feminist while saying it.

The first time I attempted this, I had to look up how to do it online.  I then looked into my good old reference cookbooks with all the classics.  Somehow, after doing it the fifth time, I finally got the hang of it.  It isn't complex, and even the first 5 times yielded something quite edible (and some would even say delicious).  It's actually so much more simple than making a big pot of chickpea stew.  You don't even need a meat thermometer, although I would advise picking up one for a few bucks simply for piece of mind.  

If you have an hour and a half to cook it, then the prep time is 15 minutes.  I mean, less prep time than some frozen dinners!  I don't understand why every graduate from every college across America isn't required to demonstrate how to properly roast a chicken before given his or her diploma.  I mean, we could seriously solve some pizza take-out issues in this country if all the 20-somethings could just throw a bird in the oven every couple of days.  I know I could have used the skill at age 21 when I was trying to save my food pennies for stiletto heels and short sparkly skirts to go out dancing in.  

A big hunk of animal can be terribly intimidating.  How do you cook it all the way through without it becoming something resembling jerky?  What if I don't cook it through and all my guests are keeling over onto my dining room table with food poisoning?  What if I touch it, it feels slimy and then I don't want to eat it for dinner anymore?  Okay, I can't help you with that one.  Just tell yourself it's a big slippery piece of tofu or something.

Step One:  What kind of chicken to buy?

I always recommend buying an organic chicken.  If you're lucky enough to have farmers at the local markets who sell their chickens, then I would recommend those.  The best chickens come from farmers who take care of their animals, give then space to roam and bugs to eat... happy chickens!  Otherwise, go to your natural foods store and ask about organically-raised animals.  At the very least you won't be eating the pesticides that they had been eating... and just maybe they were well-raised too.   However, I would always go with the happy chickens first, and you can't find those anywhere but roaming on small organic farms.  Find a chicken that's around 3-4 pounds.

Step Two: What do I cook it in?

I really like those roasting pans that happen to come with many ovens.  For most people who don't cook very much, those are the largest pans in the house.  Just take the bottom pan (not the top slotted part) and put the chicken, wings-down, in the center of the pan.  

Step Three: Prepping the chicken

This part is easy - just use the veggies and herbs you have in your kitchen!  With the chicken in the center of the pan, surround the bird with chopped potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, celery, kale, sliced lemons... whatever you have lying around.  If you have fresh herbs, load in tons of thyme, rosemary and sage on the veggies.  Stuff the bird with some herbs too, and some lemon slices as well.  Dried herbs are also nice, just don't skimp.  Dump 1/4 cup of the dried stuff around the bird.  Take some peeled garlic cloves and tuck them under the chicken's skin.  You may need to loosen it up with your fingers first (poke them under and explore around, separating the skin from the flesh underneath).  Put sea salt and cracked pepper on the skin and veggies.  Now take some flavorful liquid - water or white wine will do... or vegetable stock... and pour it around the chicken until you can't pour more, fearing you'll dump it everywhere when you lift the pan. 

Step Four:  Roasting It

Heat the oven to 425 degrees.  Put your chicken in the oven, and just let it cook for the first 20 minutes or so.  Open the door after that and pour the liquid over the chicken and the vegetables, moistening the skin.  You don't want the chicken to dry out.  Do this every 20 - 30 minutes.  The chicken should take no more than one and a half hours to roast.  You can make yourself feel more assured that you're not making chicken jerky by inserting the thermometer into the thigh meat - what does it read?  You know your chicken is just about done when it registers 160 degrees.  I like mine to be at 180 degrees, because then it is fall-off-the bone tender. You'll need the full hour and a half to reach this point.  However, if your chicken is larger you'll need more time.

You're done, now isn't that easy?  There may be a few finer points here and there to make it rock star awesome, but you can literally throw it in the oven and be a slacker, and it would still be delicious.

Okay everybody, your homework assignment is to roast a chicken.  Now get to it.  

 

Tangential Tuesday - Rosemary

There used to be a renowned restaurant here in Seattle (now closed) that served a famous Douglas Fir Martini.  Yes, you heard that right.  A pine tree snowball dropped right into your vodka 'tini.  Though 'pine tree' isn't exactly a flavoring that sounds appetizing to me at first glance, I nonetheless was intrigued.  Pity that I didn't have a chance to try it, as the place closed not long after I moved here.  But isn't it telling, the fact that you could actually find an evergreen cocktail here in Seattle.  Here in the Emerald City, I think we're a little obsessed with our evergreen surroundings.  I really can't blame the Seattle foodies for breaking out the tree-flavored cocktails (and not just because we're known to be the tree-hugging type).  

We actually use evergreens all the time to season and add flavor to foods and spirits. You taste that juniper in your gin?  Yup, it's the berry from an evergreen in the cypress family.  And the most common herb with a pine-like flavor and aroma? Rosemary.  The evergreen rosemary bush has long been used in cuisine but also for religious and spiritual purposes in Roman times.  Although it's an evergreen, it actually belongs in the mint family.  That piney smell comes from an aromatic compound called pinene found in the needle-like leaves. 

There are many other herbs whose flavor is enhanced by pinene.  Sage, thyme, marjoram, nutmeg, fennel and many others possess this pungent chemical that awakens our tastebuds.  Rosemary, however, is one of my favorites.  When I first moved to Seattle from the Midwest, my neighbors' choices for hedging were shocking: rosemary bushes.  You mean that people just grow this stuff outside as decorative landscaping?  My thoughts turned to my desperate attempts at keeping a tiny, woody, scrappy-looking rosemary plant alive in a small terra-cotta pot in the dead of a Chicago winter.  But here, in the land of plenty, even the decorative shrubs spelled dinner.  Soon, every pasta sauce, omelet, and chickpea stew had at least a few branches of rosemary thrown in.  Mark was even more addicted to the stuff, taking my cue and pilfering the neighbors' yards when shades were drawn so we could have a few leaves to add to the roast chicken and Sunday night's pizza.  I can't even imagine buying the stuff now... would be kind of like buying dandelions.

Rosemary can be used  in so many interesting concoctions.  I've had a rosemary lemonade at Cafe Flora, rosemary cookies, the thicker branches may be threaded through meats for outdoor grilling, and Martha Stewart even suggests getting a little pleasantly tipsy with a rosemary pear vodka cocktail.    

So tell me, what's your rosemary inspiration? 

Portland's the pretty one

***Sorry I've been gone so long, but traveling for play and for work took over last week... look for my regular posts and tangents coming soon!

I hate to admit this, but I think Seattle's little stepsister may just have her beat.  I don't think I've ever seen so many smart, stylish, local and seasonally-focused restaurants packed into a few square miles in my life.  And the Portland Saturday farmer's market? Don't get me started.  There are some smart people in Portland, and it seems as though they all love food.

It didn't help, of course, that I was there for a few days to visit my foodie friend Kim who I met while waiting tables years ago in downtown Chicago.  She is one of those rare friends who finds as much infinite enjoyment as I do in walking for hours all over the city, pointing out every new dining hot spot and sneaking into hotel lounges to check out the cocktails and the atmosphere... who will insist on rounding the giant farmer's market at least fully twice before making any final decisions on the ingredients for dinner.  She's one of the few others in my life who considers grocery shopping a recreational sport.  

I hadn't seen Ms. Kim in over two years - and we had so much to catch up on.  We knew this kind of conversation was going to take large amounts of wine imbibed in an atmosphere full of intrigue (like our love stories) and warmth (like our friendship).  "I know!" Kim blurted out, "let's go to Ned Ludd!"  It was her new little Portland dining secret.  Now, I warn you, if you go to Ned Ludd, you must like meat and especially pork products (but I cheated and had the trout - genius!)  The guy who owns the place butchers and cures all his own meats, and uses a wood-fired oven to cook absolutely everything.  Nothing modern and fancy here, folks.... thus the name Ned Ludd.  I had no idea who this Ned fellow was before Kim filled me in, but after dinner I wanted to stand up and proclaim to the world that I too was a proud Luddite.

 bitter greens salad with radishes

So the next time you're in Portland, I would highly recommend dropping into this modern - yet - old school place, a museum of old world style set inside a sleek steel box of a building on Portland's MLK Boulevard. 

No good foodie would leave Portland without experiencing good beer and good coffee.  I had both.  The beer came to me within hours of crossing the Washington-Oregon border.  My traveling friends convinced me into stopping at the Portland Laurelwood Brewery before heading into the Pearl district to meet up with Kim.  So glad I did.  The Hoppy Monkey IPA is worth the 3.5 hour drive from Seattle.  Fantastic.

beer + sunshine = pure hoppiness

The destination for coffee came the next day, when Kim and I did our urban hike around the city.  One of the first stops was the famous Stumptown Coffee.  Even in Seattle this coffee has made a name for itself, but I wanted to experience the real thing, complete with shots pulled in the original location by guys with flannel and beards and girls with black locks and cool jeans.  The space was far from alt-grunge.  It was open, airy and minimal with an espresso machine sleek as a Ferrari (and probably just as expensive.)  My cappuccino was just as a cappuccino should be.  You don't need the plane ticket to Italy, trust me.

I left Portland feeling as though my stay was at least cut two days short.  That's how long it would have taken to get in at least two more Stumptown cappuccinos, a lunch at Blossoming Lotus, cocktails and dinner at Urban Farmer and an afternoon bike ride around the city to work off a Voodoo doughnut.  

I have some plans for Portland.

Tangential Tuesday - HFCS

Welcome to my very first official Tangential Tuesday.  Ahem, we will begin this session with a single question that, after answered in tangential detail, will lead us down a path of political and nutritional enlightenment. We will pose "Why do I see the ingredient High Fructose Corn Syrup listed on every freaking package of food that I buy from Earl's General Market?"  Deceptively simple, this query - but great question! (patting my readers on the back.)  

There has been so much hype in the media about this one ingredient, and it's implication for our health and our waistlines.  HFCS is ubiquitous these days, found in everything from soda to 'healthy' yogurt products.  It's being blamed for rising rates of obesity by researchers and nutritionists, with the industry fighting back with some fairly lame commercials.

We will divide this answer into three segments.  The first segment will an explanation of what HFCS is.  The second segment will be political.  The third we will explore societal and commercial reasons.  I will then conclude with my little Nutritionist rant that will hopefully prove to be more than a little entertaining.  Enjoy, and keep the topic suggestions coming.

What is High Fructose Corn Syrup?

HFCS is sugar.  Well, maybe not exactly what we think of as sugar - that white grainy stuff that (hopefully) comes from cane (and not GMO beets... but I won't go off on a tangent) and that we put into our favorite batches of cookies.  HFCS is corn sugar that is extracted from kernals of corn in which sugar and starches naturally occur.  You surely remember biting into an ear of buttery, sweet goodness in the summertime. Banish all thoughts of sweet delicious goodness.  The majority of this sugar comes from GMO corn of a type that you wouldn't think of buttering up and sinking your teeth into.  This corn comes from depleted soils, is covered in pesticides and is not sweet at all in flavor.  If you think I'm being dramatic, you can yourself sneak into a Midwest field late at night and steal an ear or two.  Yuck.  Not like I've done this before or anything...

The starchy corn they (Cargill to be exact, but not to name names) turn into HFCS by exposing the corn's starches to specific enzymes which change them into a fructose product.  The fructose is then mixed with glucose to produce HFCS with differing percentages of these two sugars: glucose and fructose.  In nature, glucose and fructose exist together in varying amounts, but glucose almost always outnumbers fructose molecules in things like apples or oranges.  Fructose is so named because it is the sugar that is found in many fruits.  So if it is found in fruits, then why is it so bad?  And why do companies want fructose and not glucose? Why don't they produce High Glucose Corn Syrup?

First of all, fructose itself never killed anyone.  However, we must consider that fructose is never found in such high ratios with glucose in naturally sweet fruits.  Secondly, fructose tastes much sweeter to our tongues than glucose does, so fructose is a more potent sugar to our senses.  Thirdly, fructose does not go directly into our bloodstream as sugar, it must first pass through the liver and then be converted to glucose.  Some fructose is converted directly to fat.  This my friends, is the big sticking point for many health researchers.  Obesity is pandemic in the USA... is it due to the amount we eat, the sugar we're consuming which gives us extra calories, or the type of sugar we choose to consume?  The answer may lie in all of the above. 

Political 

In the USA, our government decided long ago that in order to secure our nation's food supply (which was subject to all kinds of price variability from weather and other factors) they would offer something to farmers called subsidies.  These subsidies are payments from the government which assure that farmers have a reason to get out on the plows every year.  Subsidies make sure that farmers make enough money to stay in business - no matter what.  The higher your yield from a crop of wheat, corn, etc. the more money you make  In this way subsidies also act as incentives to produce more (thus securing a steady and abundant food supply).  These subsidies mean that farmers who choose to produce the cereal grains, wheat, corn and soybeans among others, that these subsidies cover will be rewarded with job security, a steady income, and an incentive to intensively farm the land to squeeze out as high a yield as possible from the tired and depleted soil.  With the help of pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified seeds, huge machinery and acres upon acres of land, farmers in the US produce more wheat and corn than you can shake a stick at.  A large portion of these crops are fed directly to cattle and other livestock to fatten them up properly (even though cows aren't suppose to eat corn and get sick when they do.)  Even after the corn is thrown at the animals, there is so much left over that we actually have to invent uses for it.  Even if we don't eat the corn directly in products - which we do anyway in large amounts, we end up eating it in some form in corn starch or a hundred other strange and non-corn-like sounding compounds which invade our processed foods.  

This is how you make gold from garbage.  You take a product, process it, and then sell it for more than you could have sold it in its original form.  This is what has happened with High Fructose Corn Syrup.  We've made something desirable (sugar) from something unexciting and absolutely worthless because we have so much of it.  

Why do we put it in everything?

Well, why do we put sugar in everything to begin with?  Sugar makes things sweeter, more desirable (from an evolutionary standpoint, humans with access to more carbohydrates for energy have stamina for the big hunt) and makes us want to eat more of it.  This is great for companies who want you to like their product and, naturally, eat more of it.  These days it seems that everything we eat is sweet.  Our tastebuds have gotten used to all kinds of extreme firework displays of salt and sugar on our palate - so that when we taste something naturally sweet such as plain rice, we don't taste the sweetness at all.  The more we deafen our tastebuds, the more sugar is required to tell us "this is sweet".

We have gotten used to processed foods where sugar is added in large quantities to give the food flavor. Because the actual food itself is of low quality and not fresh, it doesn't have much flavor.  To solve this, we add salt and sugar.  Sugar also acts as a preservative in foods so that it has a longer shelf life.  Sugar is a substance which is 'hydrophilic' or 'water-loving' meaning that it steals the water that bacteria and molds would use to grow and proliferate.  So why do food industries use HFCS instead of sugar?  Simple answer:  it's cheaper.  And as mentioned in the first part, it's also more bang for their buck because it's sweeter.  

A dear friend of mine from Russia was telling me how much she missed her beloved Russian rye bread and how she couldn't find anything comparable to it here in the states in regular stores.  She asked me, perplexed, "why is all the bread here sweet?  Bread isn't supposed to be sweet!"  Sure enough, when you look at every single loaf of bread in the supermarkets you'll see HFCS listed on the label.   

Nutritionist Rant

The question comes down to "Would you eat this?  Why or why not?"  In my personal and professional opinion, HFCS is in theory unappealing and in reality very much so.  Have you ever seen HFCS sold in bottles in stores?  There is a reason for that... because it's disgusting.  It is a sloppy grey mess which I've heard doesn't smell very good.  I have an obvious bias against it because it's what I call 'industrial food' and it won't enter into my diet because I don't eat processed foods very often.  When I make cookies, I use minimally processed cane sugar.  When I want to sweeten my plain yogurt, I use honey or agave nectar.  You don't see me dumping mono and di-glycerides into my bread when I make a loaf - why would I use industrial additives in my foods?  Where the heck would I get them if I wanted them?  If it doesn't naturally occur in nature... if I can't make it myself in my kitchen, then no thank you.  

Us human beings are always thinking we can somehow improve upon mother nature.  We think we can make food in ways that mother nature can't, and then sell them to each other to make money and in the meantime keep us fed and healthy.  Well, we can't.  There is a reason that human beings have evolved as they have over time, in genetic harmony with nature.  We eat nature's foods, our genes and our bodies respond the way we should because we're part of that nature we're consuming.  Our bodies don't like industrial food... just like cows eat grass, not GMO corn... and we get sick and obese and cows get sick and fat.  We just give the cows antibiotics and then enjoy their well-marbled meat.  We also get antibiotics and then have to shop in the Plus Size section in Wal-Mart.  You can't fool nature.