In his opinion piece in the NYT on Saturday, Nicholas Kristof talks about the link between our national health and our increasingly industrialized agriculture system and notes that we might want to be focusing at least as much on our food delivery system as our health delivery system.  He talks up the new documentary, "Food, Inc.", out this last weekend, a documentary that may do for food what "An Inconvenient Truth" did for climate change.  

"Agribusiness companies exercise huge political influence, and industry leaders often fill regulatory posts. The Food and Drug Administration consequently dozed, and the number of food safety inspections plunged.

"There is some evidence that pathogens, including E. coli, become much more common in factory farming operations. Move feedlot cattle out to a pasture for five days, and they will lose 80 percent of the E. coli in their gut, the film says. And the massive routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals is a disgrace that reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating sick humans."

Although I've been hearing a lot about it, I haven't yet seen it.  However, Kristof says, "Be warned that you may not want to eat for a week afterward."