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?