I don't understand cancer

Sometimes I wish that I were smarter and could understand more things. One of those mysteries of life that I don't understand is cancer. I mean, there are so many kinds, some curable, some not, some aggressive, some that respond to treatment. I just don't understand why it is some cancers are so damned aggressive and kill people quickly and don't respond to any kind of treatment. I've lost a number of friends to this kind of cancer, and I don't get it. What is it that scientists are missing and why? When will they get to the heart of what makes cancer tick? I know - there are so many varieties of cancer: breast, prostate, kidney, ovarian, brain, pancreatic, etc., and each of them requires a different kind of treatment depending on where the cancer is located. I just find myself mystified by this disease and wishing that there was some easy answer to treating it and even curing it. I wish that I was one of these brilliant scientists working on trying to find the answers, and some part of me thinks that maybe Big Pharma is somehow keeping a cure for cancer from happening because of how much money they make on cancer drugs. I know this sounds paranoid, but I can't help but think that there's a cure out there and there are forces preventing it from happening. In the meantime, people are getting sick and dying, and it seems like my generation is particularly affected. I blame our post-WWII corn fed, overprocessed diet. We're mostly an obese generation that chows down heavily processed foods full of who-knows-what chemicals put in them to help them travel long distances and have longer shelf life in the grocery store. We've lost our connection to our food and where it comes from, but a hopeful sign is the sudden burgeoning of local farmer's markets and a "localvore" movement toward sustainable agriculture and eating locally produced food. This is a good thing and I hope that it continues.

EAT LOCAL!

One of the encouraging things about the movement toward supporting local agriculture is that it will probably curb the whole trend toward urban sprawl that has eaten up so much of our farmland. It will also encourage people to eat healthier diets and maybe even reduce illnesses that are caused by eating highly processed foods. I'm encouraged by the growth of "CSA's" - community supported agriculture, where you buy into a local farm and you get a share of the harvest. It could be anything, even stuff you don't necessarily want or need, but still, people are buying into this program through the USDA. There are also community gardens which allow people to have a place to grow their own food, because not all of us have someplace to do that. Having eaten freshly grown local food, I can attest to how much better it tastes. It's not processed, pasteurized, homogenized or any of that stuff. It's the same kind of food our ancestors ate for so long, and we've lost touch with that part of our heritage. But small local farms are starting to see some success thanks to the "localvore" movement, driven in part by books written by Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma", "In Defense of Food", etc.), as well as numerous food recalls due to toxins in large agri-business plants and a lack of inspection of our foodstuffs. People want to know where their food comes from. They don't want to have to worry about e-coli or salmonella contamination of what they eat. Knowing where your food came from and growing it yourself assures that you know what's on your dinner table at night. Sadly, we have such a short growing season here in Ohio that in the winter, we're forced to eat stuff sent from California and Florida and it just doesn't taste as good because things are picked green and ripen en route to the store instead of being able to ripen naturally on the plant like it should. I prefer food that is allowed to ripen as it should, on the tree, in the ground - whatever. It just tastes better, period, and as soon as people discover that fresh food tastes better, I'm sure that they will flock to the localvore movement like so many others have been lately. Let's hope it puts a real dent in Big Agri-Business and their attempt to control what we eat.