Our Daily Bread

Our Daily Bread is a haunting, relatively new documentary about the modern food business. Visually stunning and often disturbing, this film is not for the faint of heart. As a vegan for many years, I couldn't bear to watch the scenes of abuse and slaughter unfold yet another time before my eyes, and I ended up fast-forwarding through the animal scenes and focused instead on the farming. If you could call it that. Gone are the farmers on their hands and knees, weeding their crops and caring for their plants. Here to stay are GMO crops looking slightly alien, yet identical to the thousands of others under the same roof. I found myself gazing at the beautiful symmetry of the hydroponic greenhouse, comparing it to the pyramids at the Louvre. Gigantic machines spray pesticides, thrash wheat, while workers at night quickly pluck and wrap cabbages while the machine dictates their progress. Farming is no longer romanticized in this vision of food production.
Memorable scenes include one where a huge industrial crop waterer spread its wings like a giant, graceful pterodactyl. Beautiful sunflowers are covered in a haze of pesticides.
Disturbing scenes include a baby chick processing plant where women unfeelingly toss baby chicks into a giant machine which takes them through a crazy amusement park-like ride until, presumably their death. Farmed fish swimming like sardines in a can, never given the opportunity to swim free and have a chance at life.
Despite the beauty of the film, I was left feeling dirty and sad. For most people living on a modest budget, there is little one can do to avoid the commercial food chain. Alex Jones, yesterday on his podcast on Infowars.com, was speaking of a future, fifty years from now, where we will all be vegans, not by choice, but because there will be no room to raise animals and of a future where all our food comes from genetically modified sources controlled by the government. Now is the best time to try your hand at container gardens for city-dwellers and more ambitious planting for those fortunate enough to own green space. I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but the most important thing when choosing your food is knowing where it came from, not necessarily organic, since the big producers are getting around federal guidelines and establishing their own, but local, farm-raised produce, picked and raised by loving human hands.
I'm thankful that I no longer eat meat, so I don't feel the guilt that often accompanies meat consumption, but I also feel the duty to raise my own food to keep various strains of vegetables alive, until they take that from us too.

Oh yeah, and the best part of this film? Even though it is a foreign film, there are no subtitles; the machines do the talking.

Seen on Rittenhouse Square

I can't tell you how many times I'm behind someone on the street as they throw out their wrapper to their big mac or cigarettes. Often, I fume with anger and mutter unintelligible things behind their backs, but sometimes I actually say stuff. I don't understand why someone would throw trash on the street when there are two trash cans on either side of the block. Laziness? Some sort of culture barrier? A secret effort to keep Philly dirty and rough-n-tumble? It's time to grow up Philadelphia. Some neighborhoods are showing their true colors.

Yesterday I saw a solar powered trash compactor in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. Wow, I thought; the only neighborhood where people actually put trash in trash cans gets this newfangled contraption. Neat.
Now if we can only get people to actually us it.
Read more here.
On the slate: Teaching people how to properly use a trash can.

Nutrition tips from a beached whale

This morning on Rachel Ray, beached whale Winona Judd gives nutrition tips. I'm sorry, but if someone with two chins is giving you tips on how to eat healty, run, as fast as you can, to the nearest salad bar.

exlusive:word usage

Exclusive: a piece of news, or the reporting of a piece of news, obtained by a newspaper or other news organization, along with the privilege of using it first.

All day long I hear on the news, "join us for our exclusive interview with ________ tomorrow evening". The thing is, every network says the same thing. Rachel Maddow made fun of herself last week, saying she had an exclusive interview with Rod Blagoyevich, adding, the she was the only person on her network at that time slot to host the interview, making light of the fact that there wasn't a soul he wasn't willing to talk with. What I'm getting at is, the word exclusive prompts me to wonder if this term isn't overused. Katie Couric is hosting an exclusive interview with the pilot that landed in the Hudson weeks ago, but wait, wasn't Larry King the first person to interview him, like over two weeks ago? Please clarify, oh holy media.

What's with this exclusivity. Networks want you to think they have the only word, even though it has already been broadcast all over the place all week. I'm not challenging the media or anything, I just wish they'd stop exploiting the English language for their express purposes.