12 dollars for a two-piece chicken meal. That price is what the future of fast-food will look like if Austin-based Fresas restaurant gains traction by providing customers with hormone-free, vegetarian-fed chicken.

Margaret Vera teamed up with Tracy Overnath, Larry McGuire, and Tom Moorman to create their version of healthy fast-food. Taking their cue from the White House’s healthy initiatives, movies like Food Inc., and Americans inability to understand and let alone lay a foundation for changing food subsidies, the quartet seized an opportunity to capitalize off a growing and uber-profitable organic foods industry, one that brings in over 5 billion dollars annually to a handful of huge food conglomerates alone.

Huffington Post’s Stephanie Keller had a chance to go down to Central Austin and taste some of the fare. She liked it. Fresas serves Mexican style charcoal chicken meals, similar to the popular Southwest fast-food joint El Pollo Loco — just a lot more pricey.

Fresas is not the first of its kind, as former McDonald’s CEO is taking a shot at organic fast-food with Lyfe Kitchen. In Palo Alto, Lyfe Kitchen founder, Mike Roberts, wants everything to model McDonald’s efficiency but with latest green technology, which is expensive but helps patrons feel good about their purchase.

“We’re in the middle of the first stage of the food revolution,” he says. “I’m dreaming of a place where science, medicine, producers, farmers, and restaurateurs meet to say we are on a journey together.”

This is no doubt the future for some (mostly the affluent and health conscious), but the majority of folks will have to deal with the rising costs at their local fast-food restaurant sans the healthy benefits (I can’t imagine paying more for questionable meat). As we continue to be apathetic about our environment and food, Congress will continue to ignore climate change, and more places like Fresas and Lyfe will pop-up, keeping a certain segment of the population healthy while everyone else deals with ammonia-laced meat.

Whether its man-made or a naturally occurring event, climat change is happening, and it’s set to send food prices through the roof this fall. If McDonald’s is still offering a Dollar Menu this fall and winter, and its quarterly profits continue to rise, we should all, first, question what kind of meat its serving to us, but more importantly, blame ourselves for electing Congresspeople who are only accountable to the corporations that lace their pockets with our misery.