A light dinner last night called for a medium-heavy breakfast this morning. I’m talking eggs scrambled with chopped green chile and minced garlic, diced spuds with green chile, red bell pepper, scallions, garlic and cilantro, shredded lettuce and sliced tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, and a hunk of leftover grilled flatiron steak. Plus coffee, of course. A day without the velvety black goodness is a day without sunshine.

Speaking of beef, here’s a story you don’t want to read if you’re big on mystery meat. It’s straight out of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” I forwarded it to my man Hal, a meat-eater who is intensely interested in eating well and locally, and he replied, “This is why we raise our own.”

Hal was cooking for a couple dozen folks at a neighbor’s birthday party last night and drank wine with the gent who owns the plant that processes his beef, which when still on the hoof meanders around the neighborhood eating grass at 8,800 feet. Not many of us live this close to our grub, which goes a long way toward explaining how a young girl can wind up paralyzed from the waist down by eating a shitburger.

Interestingly, Hal also claims that there are “many more cases of food-borne illness from produce than from meat, fish, chicken and eggs combined.” I don’t know whether he’s right, but I do recall the salmonella-tainted jalapeños of 2008 and E. coli-contaminated spinach of 2006, clear indications that vegetarianism does not guarantee one a clean bill of health.

For a variety of perfectly defensible and irksome reasons I am not in Santa Fe collecting freshly roasted bushels of New Mexico’s finest green chile, soaking at Ten Thousand Waves, eating at La Choza, drinking at Second Street Brewery and dodging cacti on the Dale Ball trails.

That said, we are not entirely without the green goodness here at Chez Chien. I picked up one bushel of freshly roasted medium Hatch from a seasonal street vendor I’ve patronized for the past three years and another of Big Jim from Colorado’s Western Slope, courtesy of Spencer’s Lawn & Garden. Six bags — about 50 chiles — are in the ‘fridge for immediate use, and the rest, as you can see, are in the freezer.

The Hatch seems a bit mild, but the Big Jim packs something of a wallop. After peeling and nibbling on a pepper from each batch, I made a pot of green chile sauce using a 50-50 blend, poured it over a rack of buffalo chorizo enchiladas with a little extra-sharp cheddar and Monterey Jack, popped it in the oven for 20 minutes, dug in and presto! Head sweat. Good times.

Herself had to take an intermission between enchiladas, but at least her hair didn’t catch fire this time.

Here’s an interesting read from Michael Pollan on the transformation of cooking from meal preparation to spectator sport. Writing for The New York Times, Pollan says the average American spends 27 minutes daily on food preparation and another four minutes cleaning up — “less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.”

Adds Pollan: “What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for. What is wrong with this picture?”

Plenty, says Pollan, whose piece touches favorably on Julia Child and less so on the rise to dominance of industrially prepared “food” and “cooking” that consists largely of opening packages. He also brings up Erica Gruen, the cable exec who shifted the Food Network’s target audience from people who like to cook to people who like to eat — to wit, men. Hence the rise of gastronomic gladiator shows like “Iron Chef.”

“People don’t watch television to learn things,” Pollan quotes her as having told a journalist. Truer words, etc.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we’re all working more — since 1967, Pollan says, Americans have added “the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor” to the total amount of time we spend at work each year.

“Not surprisingly,” he adds, “in those countries where people still take cooking seriously, they also have more time to devote to it.”

And don’t expect an American gastronomic renaissance anytime soon, if food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer’s pessimistic view of our culinary future is accurate. Discussing the dream of Americans returning to their own drab kitchens from their glitzy televised counterparts, he tells Pollan:

“Not going to happen. Why? Because we’re basically cheap and lazy. And besides, the skills are already lost. Who is going to teach the next generation to cook? I don’t see it.

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket.”

Now, before you bellow, “That’s bullshit! I cook!”, take a look around you. Sure, you cook, and so do I. But the only thing eating into McDonalds’ profits is unfavorable currency trading — it’s considered bad news that the burger giant’s same-store sales rose only 2.6 percent from June 2008 to June 2009. Analysts had expected twice that.