Thinking

i am in the process of reading the omnivore's dilemma (thanks to j's mom for passing that along) and i came across an interesting passage that got me thinking..."if the sixteen million acres now being used to grow corn to feed cows in the United States became well-managed pasture, that would remove fourteen billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere each year, equivalent of taking four million cars off the road"...here are my thoughts...cows shouldn't really be eating corn...their bodies were made with all those stomachs (my biology is not so great so no quoting me) for the purpose of digesting _grass_ not corn...but there is this huge system of corn driven agri-business that is in place that is going to be really difficult to dismantle...but think about it...taking this corn land and making it pasture would have a huge impact on what we as american's eat and a huge impact on the environment...the corn that doesn't go into animal feed gets made into corn syrup and corn derived food additives...if we got rid of all of that corn syrup our diets would undergo a drastic change for the better and might even begin to cut into the epidemic of obesity in this country...so by changing this one thing would could potentially be fixing two really big problems...but i am stuck with the how...how do we as regular folks dig into this...i know that i am doing my best to support locally produced foods as much as i can...but how can we make a bigger impact...i guess i need to do some more thinking...