There is a book called "The Omnivore's Dilemma" written by an American, Michael Pollan, a journalist of considerable energy and thoroughness who decided to delve into the business of growing the food that we consume.

What he discovered was enough to make a person stop eating ever again, at least from the products one would buy at almost any conventional grocery store.

In brief, he learned about the importance of corn, of how everything thing we eat is mainly made with corn one way or another, including meat.

He followed the processing of a steer from birth to its life's conclusion and his description of the last several weeks of that animal's life was as close to misery as imaginable both for the steer and for those of us who would eventually consume it.

Walking along beside the meat counter at the local supermarket, there are packages of meat which boast that the remains of the beast within has been "corn fed", as though this were a good thing.

Wait a minute, though, are cattle not ruminants? Eaters of grass? Beasts who consume grasses over a lengthy time of digesting, while nourishing those same grasses with manure as they consume them?

They used to be. For the last few decades, though, they have been herded into close pens, the ground of which is a layer of their own feces, now no longer good for anything, but positively poisonous coming as it does, from animals who are being made ill by eating corn mixed with high doses of antibiotics to counter the effects of the unnatural food, plus a additive of remnants of other cattle and animals, for extra protein. Cows eating cows. This last practice was finally banned in 1997, but in many feed mills, cattle are still fed animal protein.

The whole thing began when a Jewish German chemist named Fritz Haber discovered how to create nitrogen, the cornerstone of all agricultural life. Without nitrogen, there would be no crops or, therefore, no mankind.

The problem which Haber solved was that nitrogen develops within the earth at a rate that is too slow to maintain the growth of human population. With Haber's resolution to this problem, plants could be synthetically fertilized to grow prodigiously and in sufficient quantity to satisfy the needs of a rapidly over-populated world.

However, the problem is the composition of the fertilizer. Haber, having developed synthetic nitrogen, also assisted the Nazi war effort by developing poison gases: ammonia and chlorine and was "on the front lines directing the first gas attack in history", according to Haber's biographer, Vaclav Smil.

So, in 1947, so Mr. Pollan tells us, a munitions plant in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making fertilizer with the huge amounts of residual ammonium nitrate, which had heretofore been the main ingredient in explosives.

Furthermore, pesticides were created with the poison gases used for the war. Both these now agricultural aids were the left-overs from the materials used in the war. Moreover, the process - combining nitrogen and hydrogen under immense heat and pressure in the presence of a catalyst - demands the use of electricity and the hydrogen is supplied by oil or natural gas - fossil fuels.

Hybrid corn gobbled up the so-called benefits of these new inventions resulting in unprecedented volumes of crops.

Although this book is written by an American about American groceries, it is obvious that everything he says applies to us. And what he says is that everything we eat has prodigious amounts of corn in it. The mainstay of this is corn syrup, the cheapest kind of sweetener there is and we consume huge quantities of it. Every product in a package is loaded with corn based sugars - just read the labels.

Of these, of course, soft drinks, so-called "pop", the "let's pretend we're fruit-juice" are laden with the high fructose of corn syrup.

It is not that corn in and of itself is a bad food, it is the unnatural use of it to feed cattle and what has been distilled from it that are the problems; the intense level of sweeteners and the complete lack of nutritional value that is beating up our health, creating adult level diabetics in our children and putting three out of five of us in the over-weight category.

In the 1960s there was the counter culture, the rebellion against industrialized food, the corn-fed, animal protein fed cattle, the synthetics in food - in short, the birth time really of products labeled "organic". In the beginning, it was all fine ideals and good intentions. However, when does big business fail to eventually recognize a trend that has the potential to reap huge profits?

People had begun to feel worried about the way their beef, chickens and pork were being fed just before slaughter and they, rightly, feared for their own well-being in the consumption of these animals. Over the last twenty years or so, organics has been massaged, as it were, to accommodate demand and the bottom line. In other words, some of the ideals gave way to the demands of volume.

Once again, cattle, pigs and chickens are relegated to cramped quarters, again they are laying in their own mess. Although they are being fed "organic" feeds, the feed is still corn and soy.

"Free-range" does not necessarily mean that chickens leave their sheds. There are small doors to the outside which are kept closed until the birds are five weeks old, while all their food and water is supplied to them in the shed. They are, nevertheless, fed on organic feed with no antibiotics. They do have the freedom to run about within the considerable confines of their sheds but Mr. Pollan's visit to one such shed did not suggest to him that their lives were anything like the sun-kissed seven weeks of life one might wish for a nominally free range chicken.

The story of lettuce, as told by Mr. Pollan, is, in many ways, a cheerful one. It is the tale of people, like Drew and Myra Goodman of California, the founders of Earthbound Farms, who began small, growing lettuce as nature intended, being discovered by big buyers - Costco and the like - and then, finding a way to produce large quantities of lettuce while keeping to their principles. They have also been responsible for the conversion of thousands of acres of land in California to being farmed without pesticides and synthetic fertilisers

Well, the farmers are doing what they can to keep the faith, but, in reality, how "organic" can a product be when it is shipped three thousand miles to stores in the east, including our own supermarkets?

The premier supplier of organics, locally, and the most ardent campaigner for the culture, if I may call it that, is Jennifer Grant, founder and owner of Harmony Whole Foods Market.

This September, Jennifer celebrated her 30th year in the business. She started with a tiny shop on Broadway, moved to First Street and Broadway, in the very building now occupied by the Orangeville Citizen, and now presides over her establishment at the north end of First Street.

She told me in a conversation that we over coffee that the early days were very tough. Imagine, 30 years ago: who knew or cared about organics? Who understood the deprivations of industrial farming - only the very well informed few.

Something about the message of organics, though, has kept Jennifer at it, until, bit by bit, the public became more educated and the alternative to supermarket produce that she offered gained in its appeal.

Few of us know enough even now. The junk food masters, the manufacturers of soft drinks, the colas, the pretend-fruit drinks, the horror story edible substances that the fast food chains put out are still very much in business because the public does not understand the full extent of the damage this kind of eating is doing to our bodies, young and old.

Jennifer rises to rant pretty easily. She talks about the "chemical soup" in which we live and points to the large quantities of chemicals that go into our food, water and on our skin.

We are what we eat, drink and apply to ourselves. All people like Jennifer Grant can do (and it is considerable) is to offer alternatives and information. The books are there for the reading; the free pamphlets, the magazines.

What I have learned from Jennifer and Michael Pollan is that I will never cook feedlot beef or factory chicken again. There are alternatives.