Starting to care
Recently in iMentor we’ve been studying the food system and a watched a movie, Fresh. At first, I though that Fresh was just a some movie that will make you feel guilty about the food you eat. When I actually saw the movie, I started to think that the movie was not that bad. I know that many people feel that industrialized agriculture is a good idea, but there are also a handful of people who believe it is a bad idea. After doing this study, I think this is a serious issue and that many people don’t care. For example those farmers knew what they were feeding the chicken weren’t healthy for them, but they fed it to the chickens away.
One thing that I know for sure about the food system is that it is putting people in danger. Now I’ve studied my share of biology and I think that it is sort of an epidemic, the industrialized food system. Personally, it’s funny to me how even through many people know that food today is unhealthy and the way they treat plants and livestock is questionable, but they still do it.
I did some research on the food system. The movie provided a lot of information and opinions on the food system. Some people feel that the food system should be changed and they have ways to change the food system to be better, but the government and other big food companies don’t want to change. They just want to continue what they do and produce more industrialized food. There are many disasters and they don’t want to change. “What I was actually doing on my farm was basically feeding a continual dosage of antibiotics for growth rates or to ward off low-grade infections. When your best resource people tell you this is the magic drug to increase growth and efficiency, you adopt that. And it’s very dangerous: you kill off the weak strain, it could be strep or ecoli, and the strong ones survive. They multiply and mutate and become even stronger. So you create an antibiotic resistant monster strain. I realize that this whole thing about antibiotic resistance is true.” This statement didn’t surprised me at all, it make me think that people are finally realizing that it is wrong to continuously give the animals antibiotics. People must have known before, it can’t be that are just realizing this now.
Another quote that I agreed with is: “Monocultures are very dangerous things...Nature doesn’t have monocultures. When you grow too much of the same thing, you end up with too many of the pests of those things. The only reason you can grow vast amounts of species of animal in close confinement is because you can use antibiotics to keep them alive.
