You know, my girlfriend and I were in Tokyo in July. All the restaurants we went to were able to do something that most people (from America) will tell you isn't possible to do:

They gave us just the right amount of food to take us from the state of being "hungry" to the state of being "not hungry".

There was no food left over. There was no need to ask for more. Like Goldilocks said, it was "just right".

If most of my fellow Americans are content to be tricked into satisfaction ("What a great deal! Huge portions!") by paying for too much food, they can have at it. I myself never thought "Gee, this is way too much food for me. Thank GOD for this great restaurant!". I also don't weigh twice what I should, because I know that the point of eating is to stop being hungry, not to "clean my plate" or "get what I pay for".

That being said, I think the food industry in general is too complicated a subject to simplify down to "All the big corporations are bad and the little guys would be better". I agree that assembly-line beef is a disturbing thought, but I have a brother-in-law who grew up on a family farm; his view on animals is far more disturbing in the long run.....

I think we just need to have the scientists stop worrying about what's gonna happen 8,127,878,256 years from now and start perfecting the "artificial meat" process.

Then we can have PETA bitching about the fact that nobody has anywhere to put all the animals we aren't killing and eating.