I started staring at my hamburger and wondering if it was out to get me. Then I took my Burger King Whopper(tm) apart and started looking real close at the lettuce and the tomato inside, wondering about them, too.

This week's G21 Readership Poll asks if we should be worried about our food. How can we not be when we don't even know for sure what it is anymore?

Now I've heard the argument that this robot food is good for us. There are no risks involved, and that this is going to be the way to feed all the hungry of the world.

But my question is, haven't we had enough food to feed the hungry of the world for decades? Isn't "farm subsidies" all about paying folks NOT to grow certain crops? Haven't we been underproducing food for decades now, and don't certain institutions like the World Bank actually use food as a weapon against Third World countries?

Worst yet, don't we throw out enough food, here in the United States alone, to feed every hungry person on the face of the planet? Well?

So why, other than increasing the net profits of global agribusiness (as small, family-owned farms are forced into the dustbin of history here and overseas) do we need robot food?

Hold on a second, my cabbage just opened the refrigerator and is trying to bust out again... Be right back!

Pesky little buggers! Anyway, being of that generation that came after the Baby Boomers and missed the "fun" of the 'sixties/'seventies, and before the Gen-Xers and missed the angst of the 90s, me I'm thinking that maybe --- just maybe --- we citizens of this world need to take a long hard look at this drift away from actual natural food. It kindah chilled me when Ed Cantarella started talking about bone meal being used as fertilizer on vegetables. Especially since some of them vegetables ain't even "natural" anymore, they are man-made.

I was reading somewhere that many of the "natural" seeds used for crops in places like India, for example, are being supplanted by man-made hybrids that will produce more. And rice crops in Asia are being taken over by "enhanced" new strains, too. This is the product of "globalization" and is supposed to be good for us.

So why do I see all these ads for the Hunger Site all over the G21? Seems like people must still be starving every day, I figure.

What I'm talking about here, I guess, is that buzzword of the 'nineties, "choice." Choice is supposed to be what we all wants and, from what the politicians' spinmeisters say, choice is what is good for us. We need three hundred brands of breakfast cereal and fifty ways to condition our hair. We need a strip mall in every 'hood, and two chickens in every pot.

But WHAT KINDAH CHOICE YOU GOT WHEN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS YOU ARE CHOOSING? If I can't tell a real tomato from a robot tomato anymore, how am I suppose to choose? And what if don't want that robot tomato DNA becoming part of my personal ecology?