Bet you’re more than ready to say goodbye already, aren’t you? Especially those of you born with Saturn in Virgo. Pull out your party hats because this little sucka is leaving on October 29th and turning out the lights on his way out. It’s now time for the Saturn In Libra folks to step up to the plate and deal with their karma. (Note that Saturn will briefly return to Virgo in a retrograde phase next March; more on that in a few months.)

But before we part ways with this two-and-a-half-year phase, let’s review what we’ve been through. After all, we’re not going to make progress if we don’t process, right? Food has been Saturn in Virgo’s favorite topic. We’ve endured endless food scares, including E coli outbreaks, listeria rampages, and the most deadly food-borne, life-wrecking story of all: the saga of Stephanie Smith. She ate a hamburger and now she’s paralyzed for the rest of her life. If that wasn’t a Saturn in Virgo wake-up call, I don’t know what is.

Virgo rules not just the food on our tables, but also our health. The health care debate, especially during the summer of ’09, has roared on full of myth and distortion, fueled by manufactured rage from corporate lobbyists shilling for the health care industry. And as Saturn pushes for its last bit of justice on the way into Libra, it was just announced that we may yet get our public option.

Here is the upside of all the anguish, where Saturn’s work gives us consciousness and moves us forward. Locavore was the word of the year in 2007, the first year Saturn was in Virgo. We had the amazing work of Michael Pollan and the ubiquitous repetition of his quote from In Defense of Food: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” And tomorrow night, the very night before Saturn leaves Virgo, gorgeous vegan celeb Natalie Portman (who is about to have her Saturn Return) will appear on Top Chef – for a vegan cooking challenge! And just a few days later, we’ll see the publication of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals.

If you’ve survived your Saturn Return, you know that Saturn doesn’t allow short-cuts, cheating, or going backwards. If Big Agra doesn’t get that it’s time to fundamentally turn the beat around, the industry will fail in the next few years. As they say at Farm Sanctuary, “A compassionate world begins with you.” Let that be the epitaph for the Saturn in Virgo years.