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I know this is a bit off topic, but I wanted to address the question of what to eat, now that Pollan has destroyed your comfortable eating habits.  He actually addressed this issue in - In Defense of Food:  An Easter's Manifesto, his follow-up to Omnivore's Dilemma after receiving a lot of feedback on how his book spoiled the joy of eating and left people wondering what to eat.  His philosophy is simple:  eat food, not too much, and mostly plants!  Obviously, this leads to the question, what is food?  His answer, food is anything his / your grandmother would recognize.  If you are young, that answer is not helpful, so he further defined food as anything with 5 or fewer ingredients (more stories to filter through!).  Hence, a Twinkie is not food (39 ingredients), while but a small piece of beef is food.  (If you want to hear a funny take on this topic listen to this short mp3 file (download) from his appearance on Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me.

Pollan in the Philadelphia Inquirer - If you read the paper today, there was an article about Elevation Burger, which claims that there burgers are .... "not merely fresh-ground, or all-beef, or naturally raised; they are - top this! - "100 percent organic, grass-fed, free-range beef."  The article further states... But its "biggest contribution to a better planet," the fine print on its shake cup says, is the beef itself: it's fed on grass, not corn, which sucks up far less carbon dioxide, and, well, if all cattle were pastured (not grain-fed), it would be like taking four million cars off the road.

It might be the only shake cup with a footnote: The essence of that aforementioned claim can be found, it reports, in The Omnivore's Dilemma, p. 198. (And so, yes, there it is. You can look it up.)

The Omnivore's Dilemma, of course, is eco-author Michael Pollan's passionate critique of the depredations of industrial agriculture, and currently the sacred text of ethical eaters: supersizing and "cornification" don't just make you fat, he warns, but make the soil dangerously thinner (and the water and air worse).

Whether Pollan would be flattered that his critique is being stamped on shake cups to encourage the consumption of more burgers is another question.

Has anyone eaten an elevation burger? Did you notice their story on the shake cup!