Pigs in Factory Farms (from all-creatures.org)Large-scale stock-raising (cattle, chickens, pigs) and agribusiness are issues pointed out in The Raw and the Rotton: Punk Cuisine, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Meatrix. The workers in monoculture factory farms add extra anti-biotics to sick animals caused by forcing them into tight areas and inhumane living conditions. Manure ponds left in the farms are disgusting and add to the misery of life.
The Black Cat’s Café, where punks would gather, is very authentic and completely opposite from mainstream eateries. The yard is littered with “benches, tables, and cigarette butts” with some plants and inside the café are posters, run-down furniture, and art. The silver lining is the emphasis punks put on living a life they truly believe in. While I won’t regularly eat at Black Cat’s Café, I do applaud the punks’ drive and motivation against agribusiness. I like that they are taking action in what they believe compared to others who talk the talk, but not walk the walk. As I kept reading this section of the article smacked me right in the face.
“Like yeah: people are free to eat meat. But actually, in this day and age, they can’t eat meat because it’s killing animals. Because some is eating meat, land that could potentially benefit all of us is being destroyed. I have a lot of problems with that line: I don’t want to impede people’s freedom, but what everyone does affects everyone else….I honestly believe that people have to stop eating meat now. Now! I’m not gonna force anyone to stop eating meat, but they’re hurting me, my children’s future, my friends, my family—because they’re eating meat. And they’re hurting the Earth, which is most important of all.”
By eating meat, I am “hurting me, my children’s future, my friends, my family?” What!? In the beginning, that sounded absurd, but when I was reading this I slowly understood what Clark is saying. I’m sorry that I can’t stop eating meat. However, I am more informed of what I’m putting into my body and how animals are severely abused from ingesting GMO, number 2 corn (which they do not naturally eat), fat, and antibiotics to having their body parts sliced off (due to fights and diseases).
I genuinely like the ideology of punks and how they try to change by eating “raw” food, which means collecting food from dumpsters and buying/growing their own food so they aren’t wasting the large amount of calories needed to ship and package food and destroying the environment. They have that hunter-gatherer spirit.
How would you like to eat food gathered from a garbage dump? Would you dare eat it? David Giles, our guest speaker, came to our class and talked about dumpster diving and the reason behind it. Out of all the people he knew that ate from the dumpster, only one got sick and it’s more likely to get sick eating at a fast food restaurant. Before, I thought David was going to bring in fresh orange juice squeezed from oranges he found at the dumps, but he brought us Naked orange juice and blue machine, a concoction of blueberry, blackberry, and banana, from one of Seattle’s dumps. The date was a day or two expired, but it tasted like it normally would. He mentioned Food Not Bombs, an organization sharing food to those in need, which served a hot meal each week from the food collected and delivered the food to homeless shelters, food banks, and soup kitchens.
Dumpster divers, who are acting against global warming, wasting perfectly edible food, and corrupt corporations, gather food from dumpsters in a variety of neighborhoods. 96 billion pounds (1/3 of all produced in the U.S.) of food are thrown away and some are not even expired. Our society looks for perfection and cans of food with bents or distorted are wasted. Foods past the expiration dates are not spoiled or rotten until a while later. Some managers of supermarkets don’t like dumpster divers to come because they want shoppers to spend their money and rather keep the food as property than give it to others who distribute the food to the homeless.
No comments:
Post a Comment