Food Inc. will be playing at the Crested Butte Majestic Theatre beginning tonight Friday August 7 with showings at 5:30 and 7:45 PM. We have been asked to come and participate and we will table at the premiere event just to add to the fun and festivities. What’s so fun about learning about food production? When it comes to the production of your food sources what you don’t know can absolutely hurt you.
My own experiences with food choices has ranged anywhere from vegan to carnivorous, raw to cooked and has shown me that it’s not so much how the food is prepared right before you eat it as how the food is prepared from the moment of germination up until right before it’s eaten. There have been times where raw food diets or vegetarianism have served a purpose for me. It has generally been when I needed to detox from having eaten a bunch of food that I hadn’t paid attention to how it was produced and my health had become compromised for unrecognized reasons. As I proceeded to educate myself about the nature of food, its production and its subsequent adverse effects on my health, with the help of other people on the path like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Waters and Eric Schlosser I became aware of the total disrespect the industrial food production system has sold to myself, the American population and the world. It is a devastating system perpetuated by greed, exploitation and petroleum. It is wreaking extreme damage to the ecology on a grand scale and individually on the consumers of the food. It manifests in global climate change, viral pandemics, obesity, heart disease and countless other unhealthy negative feedback systems.
More specifically the issue is tied in to the economics and health care debate that is traversing the USA and the globe. Our ingredients are the fundamentals of good health and economy. When the ingredients that we eat come from a disrespectful industrial complex our health will suffer due to the lack of nutrients and the nontraditional style of food. Our economy will suffer due to the extreme exploitation of resources, employees and the Earth that falsely props it up. It is no wonder to me why the so called global economy is floundering if not outright collapsing. Much like the National Security budget, it is unaccountable. It is too big and too disconnected from the communities it is supposedly working to nurture. It is a false idol and we are reaping the destruction that has been sown so irresponsibly.
I’m not all apocalyptic downer guy because I have seen what changing my food supplier to local accountable growers has done for my personal health, my local economy, and my local community. Sure the food is a bit more expensive up front but it is the real cost of the food and I don’t waste my time or money on false bottomed promises from the health insurance industry. I have been asked by wide eyed people not much younger than me who have bought into the health insurance scheme, “What happens if you get cancer?” I reply, “Today is a good day to die.” I also know that if I avoid toxic immersion of my body inside and out I have little to fear from major health issues like cancer, heart disease, diabetes and so forth. Stranger things have happened.
