Today in class, Kelly and Kira presented on the hidden environmental problems associated with factory farming. They executed this topic with good precision and topped it off by entertaining us with "The Meatrix". This short film summed up the horrible underlying practices that occur in the process of food development. Kelly went into nice detail about the idea of 'double speak'. I find this to be a cleaver marketing attempt on behalf of the factory farmers as a way of hiding the truth from the public eye. Why is it that we hear what we want to? I don't understand how two things can mean the same thing, but give off a totally different impression of what is actually going on.
Society has gotten to the point in 'consumer society' that animals are no longer treated as a part of a natural process in providing nutritional substance to humans, but as a commodity to be mass produced, bought and sold. This eludes to the idea that these cows, pigs, and chickens are free from their "beingness" (as mentioned in the presentation) and treated as non-living objects. I think the implicatons of this can be pretty severe in terms of ethical treatment of animals, removal of jobs from local farmers/factory farms, threat of disease and other health realated illnesses (through use of antibiotic use that spawns resistant bacteria), decreased quality of food, pollution and so on. There seems to be more bad than good in terms of outcomes. Are we willing to sacrifice all these things and support industrial farming for the sake of a McDonald's burger or egg McMuffin? I would hope not.
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I too feel like we need to reevaluate what we see as a necessity in our lives. Who and what are we exploiting in order to cater to this need for consumption. I feel that most people will not sacrifice their McDonald's burgers because we have become so desensitized to whom we are actually exploiting. It is the sad reality that there needs to be a more prominent role of government to oversee these hog farms and restructure society.
ReplyDeleteI think numerous changes need to be made, but I think a lot of these structures can't change until we re-evaluate capitalist ideas. This is yet another example of how it is causing much more harm than good. Of course, these types of changes are huge and even mere policy changes take time, this is where the consumer comes in. We often forget how much power we have as consumers, if groups of people began to buy organic, free range, ethically produced meat and dairy products the potential for change is immense. The market goes where the money is, I think we need to begin by 'shopping smarter', asking questions and not settling for ambiguous answers.
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