A Little Summer Learning About Your Food.
Film Recommendations for the Truth about our Food.

I may be a little behind the times ;) but I have been checking out some of the "shockumentaries" about our food. I find what we learn in SuperSize Me about food to be completely amazing! We need not blame McDonalds for the unnutritious world we live in, they were just the first one to capitalize on it, and well. If you leave that film, and continue on to Food Inc., I expected this film to be based upon a lot of opinion and very little fact. To my surprise, although it is a fairly negative look on commercial agriculture, the film is very accurate. The one thing I must remind myself and students is this. 9 times out of 10, when you see something negative about a farm, generally it is a corporate farm run by a few bad people in a big building in a city thousands of miles away from the actual farm and only care about the bottom line; not farmers, animals, land, environment, etc. These people do not represent all of agriculture, but they definitely have an impact. After watching this film, move on to King Corn. This film shows how corn is produced and put into nearly every product that we buy causing demand for corn to increase which raises prices. This is problematic for small farms and us as consumers, but great for corporate farms through subsidies from you guessed it... government! After all of this shock toward government's role in agriculture, corporate farms, and the plight of the small farmer and the need to look into locally grown food, take a look at the movie response to SuperSize Me, called FatHead. I don't know if this one got near as much press, but this time the person in the documentary shows us how we can actually LOSE weight while eating primarily fast foods. He goes on to show us that much of what we think we know about nutrition is false. This is due primarily to marketing of various products and health programs to get into our pocketbooks... not necessarily to help us make better food choices. Unfortunately most companies do not believe in the old adage, "You can give a man a fish, he will eat for the day. You can teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime." Enjoy the films and the learning this summer! All of these films are available on Netflix.

Organic Foods - Are they better or just more expensive?

This is really a difficult question. I have used products such as vitamins that I believe had a much better affect on how I felt and I liked the idea that they were chemical free and I was only getting what I had paid for. The problem is... much of what is considered to be organic may be more harmful and definitely more expensive. Since chemical fertilizers can not be used, manure is the fertilizer of choice which introduces Salmonella and E. Coli to our fruits and vegetables that if not properly washed can cause severe sickness or death. Without the use of pesticides, miticides, fungicides, etc., much of a crop is lost to pests which has a cost that is passed on to the consumer for what is often an inferior product to what has been maintained with more traditional use.