27/1/10

Today we went and saw the chickens in the back carpark of greenschool. I wasn't surprised by what I saw, although a couple of others seemed to be. The chickens seemed fairly well-kept, in the sense that none seemed to be dying, and there was just enough space for them to move around. There were a few feed trays, although in one of the spaces there didn't appear to be any water. Some of the chickens were lying down, others were jumping about, up near the sides of the cage and stuff. I thought it was unfair that the grass and the outside world is so close to them, yet they're never allowed out. It seems.. mean. The older chickens looked less healthy, and started to appear a little sickly. I was a little shocked how some of the other students acted. They didn't seem perturbed in the least about seeing animals that would one day become food at the warung. I mean, some of them joked about it, and that makes sense, because jokes tend to cover insecurities. A personal conclusion I came to recently about me being a veggo is that where some people see Cow in a farm, and Beef on their plate, or sometimes even Beef in a farm and on their plate, I see Cow in a farm, and Cow on my plate, and I just can't bring my self to eat that. It surprises me how insensetive some people can be about all of that, espescially in our class, where we've watched movies on where our food comes from, and we see the cruelty perfomed towards both the workers and the animals in the industry, and still nothing is swayed. Everything in their head is lodged in place. Its like they feel no sympathy. I really would be interested to see how people's minds work about all of this, and how some of the people feel about animals and those issues in this unit. And if anyone has had to rethink any of their values at all after seeing Food Inc. And seeing the chickens in the carpark.

20/1/10

We continued watching Food Inc. in class today, and the movie proceeded to go more and more indept about the idea of "You are what you eat" and the actual relationship between humans and our food. In the movie, we were shown an "Old Fashioned" traditional farm, and the way animals are bred and slaughtered there, in relation to a New Fangled, Machine and slave run slaughterhouse, and the way that workers and animals alike are treated there. I think that the way our food industry has completely transformed over the past ten years is rather horrific, but what is even more so is the ignorance of 95% of the population. Even after so many documentaries and TV programs like this have been released, people choose to stay in the dark and pretend never to have heard anything. A couple mor questions arose while watching Food Inc. like, Would it even be feasible to return to traditional farming methods and still support the global population? Another thing that really clicked for me while I was watching the movie, was that the general population and industry is so caught up in the HOW of things, that the important question of WHY, is being completely overlooked! As an industry, its just growing and growing and growing, and if a problem arises, noone goes back and checks what the problem was and how it can be solved so it doesn't happen again, people just come up with new technology to overrinde the problem!! ANOTHER thing that really struck a chord with me was the PRICE issue. The fact that many people will choose two McDonalds hamburgers over a head of broccoli because theyy're cheaper, and often nowadays people don't have a huge amount of cash. So now the issue is that people can't AFFORD to be healthy. The fact is, the cheaper the food, the less well it was produced, in the sense that the food, and the workers behind the business were probably mistreated, and the workers would have low wage. However, because all the healthy, WHOLESOME, foods were produced Ethically, they are more expensive. So maybe if fast food industries were shutdown, people would get higher sources of income, and would thereby be able to afford the healthier food option anyway, balancing things out?
The amount of variables that could mess this theory up is unbelievable, and a little more than mindblowing.
My biggest question right now is, what will it take for the world to realise what we are doing to ourselves?

Class the day before the 20th

Yesterday we started watching Food Inc. And I fond out alot of things about where our food comes from that I really had no idea about. This is actually my first post under this area of study, which is Humans and Other species. I really like this topic, mainly because I'm interested in human and animal rights in many aspects. I have alot of questions to ask during this unit, lots of which I hope to soon find answers to. Like, How would the world be affected by global vegetarianism? Millions of people would lose their jobs, and species may altogether go extinct. It obviously isn't a solution o this challenge. Also, if that isn't the solution, how can we change the food production industry so that it ends up doing more good than harm? Additionally, as we know, there is plenty of food in the world, however there is a distribusion issue; an issue which many people are well aware of. Seeing as this is the case, why wont governments, or families, do anything about this? Surely it wouldn't do anything harmful?
Alot of the way animals are treated in Food Inc, shocked me, because although I am aware as a vegetarian, I didn't know that indeptly, and it was difficult to sit through and watch some of the things that went on ... ):