Fresh
New Thinking About What We're Eating
David Bell delivered a passionate and persuasive speech at our recent screening of 'Fresh' ...
... Food is the most fundamental thing. It touches us all at a basic level.
Who can forget the smell of fresh baked bread, the taste of fruit picked ripe from the tree, sun ripened warm tomatoes? Who can deny the joy of sharing food with family and friends?
Without food we starve. Without fresh wholesome food our lives are poorer. Our senses dulled by mass produced food, we grind through the days and sometimes wonder, ”What went wrong?”
This film carries many powerful messages.
It is not just the message that factory agriculture, production and processing of food are bad for us.
It is not just the message that synthetic chemical farming is bad for the soil.
It is not just the message that monocultures are bad for the environment.
It is not just the message that big business cares little for anything but the bottom line.
The most powerful message that this film contains is that people with passion, dedication, and courage can change a system that has been imposed on them.
The films title says it all. Fresh. It shows a fresh way of looking at, not just food and the way it is produced and distributed but a new paradigm of how we might live.
Joel Salatin and Russ Kremer both spoke of the need to respect the natural behavior of the livestock that they tend. That animals raised in farming systems that respect the earth and the natural processes of the earth provide more nourishing, taster food than animals raised in “efficient” man made environments.
Russ Kremer also talks about what happened in his youth when, fired up by his education, he came back to the family farm and instituted a more intensive farming regime. The declining health of his animals, the soaring cost of antibiotics and the final straw, an antibiotic resistant organism that nearly killed him, returned him to the farming practices that respected the animal’s health and welfare and respected the environment.
Then look at the feed lot. A sad sight hard surfaces animals standing in their own excrement, stinking cess pits, too much manure to use to contaminated to sell, polluting the land, the water and the air.
Then there is Will Allen, the urban farmer, taking the wasted food and scraps and using worms to compost this organic supply and creating a growing medium. In the city he has created a farm. He is recycling the ‘waste” to grow food and using his vision to educate people about good food.
What characteristic do these men share?
They are happy, their animals are happy, the pasture looks magnificent, and the variety of forage available to the herds is second to none.
Contrast Joel, Russ and Will to Mr. and Mrs. Fox who raise chickens in a factory.
I felt an overwhelming sadness watching the Fox’s describe how they had become enmeshed in the factory farming of the chickens, how they had lost control of their lives to a company that dictated to them how they had to raise the chooks down to the rate of gain in weight, feed measured to the gram.
The comments that Andrew Kimball makes regarding the ability of organic farming to feed the world are exactly the same as the findings I am seeing through VOICe. Organic agriculture can feed the world.
David Pollens comment on the dangers of monocultures and loss of diversity reinforce the need to change the way we are producing food.
The thought that bigger is better and more efficient and costs less must be challenged. David Pollen says “the idea of cheap food is a myth. There is a cost to be paid and if it is not at the cash register it is charged to the environment or the public purse as subsidies”
I did not wake up one day and say “I have had enough I am going to change the way I eat I am going to start a market I am going to change the world and the way we live”
It has been the journey through life that has brought me to this place where I am starting to question the underpinning notion that pervades our lives that the only measure of our well being is a dollar value on every thing we do.
The notion that bigger is better, growth of the economy is the only measure of “success” that the physical needs of the human species out weigh the diversity of the earth must be challenged if we are to leave our children and grandchildren a an earth that can sustain them.
What we must do now is follow the advice of the environment movement Think Global Act Local.
If we all start to question the direction that our elected representative are taking us, if we start to question the way business dictates to us how we live, we may find that we can save our earth.