There are many more documentaries out there pulling back the curtain on animal agriculture that are less graphic; however, I told myself that if I was going to continue eating meat, then I needed to be okay with how it is produced. So I took off my rose-colored glasses and made myself watch the truth, which has continued to influence my diet and lifestyle to this day. It changed my perspective on food completely and encouraged me to be an engaged consumer. Here are a few of the main realizations I had:
- There is a gaping disconnect in our understanding of how a cow, chicken, or pig results in the savory meal on our plates. It seems that the various political, marketing, and production powers churning out our food operate quietly behind closed doors. I couldn't understand how I had never connected chicken nuggets to living, breathing creatures. If we had to drive out to a factory farm and slaughter our own chicken for each meal, I am positive we would not eat it so luxuriously.Like Steel mentioned in her chapter The Land, meat has always been considered a privilege. With rapid globalization and industrialization, everyone craves this "privilege" now. What's interesting to me, is that we have evolved from thinking it is a privilege to eat sentient beings to thinking it is our right to eat them.
- The environmental repercussions of the developed world's over consumption. Whether it's bycatch and coral destruction from the fishing industry or rainforest destruction due to cattle grazing. We see it in the pollution caused by fertilizer runoff and the GHG emissions associated with moving food from country to country. We see it in the ridiculous amount of packaging for every store-bought product around us. It's something to be conscious of whether it's through eating in season, buying local vegetables, having meatless Mondays, or buying groceries in bulk when possible.
- The obsession with the sterilization of our food is something I didn't fully realize until I began volunteering at farms. One day I was working the garden at Lichgate on High Road and one of the coordinators told a friend and I to try the chocolate mint. My friend was so hesitant to try the mint, because she had never tried food straight from the ground. She ended up loving it, but it baffled me that she was wary about a local, organically grown herb rather than the vegetables she would buy at the supermarket, of which she knows neither the origin nor the grower.
We've reached a consensus as a society that sparkling clean supermarkets stocked with colorful mystery products are far superior to dirty, buggy food grown straight from the earth. This fear of the natural world and our detachment from how it sustains us is disempowering: we no longer trust the capability of our own two hands. We don't need Poptarts to thrive, but we do need fresh produce and we are incredibly capable of growing our own.
It is alarming how apathy plays a big role in the way food is treated nowadays. Food is more of a 'commodity' rather than a privilege, or something that people should work hard to earn. In developed countries, the comfort of having everything catered to one's table or in the shelf of the nearest supermarket is something that is given little to no importance, and certainly taken for granted. If people realized how much a food traveled to get to a plate maybe they would start to look for the fresh food coming from the local farmers market instead. By understanding the importance of local food systems, the needs for fossil fuels would be much less than how it currently is.
ReplyDeleteIf people saw more documentaries or facts about how food is produced nowadays, the change would be drastic. Luckily, many of the viewers have created awareness, and it is a slow but possible process for change.
Alex, I thought your point about being hesitant to try food straight from the ground was really salient, and I had a similar experience in undergrad. I was part of a class that took care of the campus's organic garden, and when my family came to visit I took them out to see it. I had been working on the green beans all semester and proudly showed them off to my mom. I plucked one off and waved it at her: try it! And then I was kind of mortified when she turned her nose up at my beautiful green bean. A similar thought flickered through my mind -- my mom is the kind of person who will "try" grapes at the supermarket before choosing a bag to purchase, but here she was refusing a green bean straight from the ground. It is very odd to me that food in the supermarket is seen, in some respects, as more natural than food straight out of a garden.
ReplyDeleteI agree! I've had that experience many times when trying to share homegrown veggies and eggs with family and friends. They'll say, "Is this okay?" or "You can just eat it, like that?" Maybe there's this idea that food needs to go through a mysterious sterilization process before it reaches the store. It's funny, because food may be even more contaminated as it passes through many hands in the long transport from farm to supermarkets.
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