Time for me to move?

Can you imagine it? Dropping everything and moving to be closer to the Earth. Kingsolver describes quite a picture. It seems like the ultimate healthy lifestyle. Eat what you can produce and try to eliminate all else. Be true to the local farmers and stop abusing fossil fuels. Kingsolver even describes how she creates her own mayonnaise. She does everything from growing her own vegetables to making her own salad dressing. It seems very cool, like something I would want to do if it was at all possible. The more I think about it, some of the things Kingsolver does are not realistic to a college student’s lifestyle. I mean, do I really have the time to grow my own food? The lack of sunlight in the places I visit most often (my dorm, library, friend’s dorm) could pose a problem. Then there is the lack of funds part of the problem. As a broke college student, even if I wanted to live the lifestyle Kingsolver describes, I don’t think it is at all financially possible. Of course, raising my own chickens is out of the question, even though that would be very interesting. Can you picture it? A long line of chickens following me to class or running around the dorms. I think that the situation Kingsolver presents in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is realistic when considered in the perspective of Kingsolver and her family, but when you consider my life at this point, there is no possible way for this to work. Kingsolver is a novelist and her husband, a professor. They were financially stable and it was a viable option for them to survive on just the locally grown food. Where am I supposed to get such things? I don’t have a car and travelling an hour on the bus to reach a farmers market does not seem like a great idea to me. Overall, I must conclude that the idea of good living that Kingsolver describes is not at all realistic for me, at least not at this time.

The Evils of Corn

After watching King Corn, I found myself even more intrigued with the food we consume. Combined with the knowledge I gained from The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the food around me became very disappointing. My poptarts, my cookies, my yogurt – all contain corn. Corn here, corn there – honestly I was this close to becoming vegan in the hopes of being healthy, but then I realized everything they eat has corn in it too. So how is one supposed to be healthy in this world that King Corn and The Omnivore’s Dilemma depict? Before all of this, I could have gone “organic” but since that no longer has meaning what am I left with? I could drop the basic junk foods – chips, soda, twinkies, and poptarts – all filled with high fructose corn syrup. There goes a chunk of the teenage diet. I could eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but then I remembered that the shine on the fruits that makes them stand out in the stores are created by yet another corn substance. Meat’s out of the question because the cow or pig it came from was probably fed with grain, feed, etc… otherwise known as corn. After seeing what happens to the cow due to corn, I’m not so sure I want to do that. So what am I to do? Is it possible to live a cruelty-free, corn-free lifestyle in today’s world? As King Corn and The Omnivore’s Dilemma have shown me, corn dominates the food industry. There are billions of pounds of it being produced in a tiny portion of the country. Salads are always an option but then again the dressing that I adore wouldn’t fit the “corn-free” requirement. So that eliminates almost everything, except water. But I know someone is going to find a way to associate corn with that too. So in order to live a corn-free world, I must not eat or consume anything, wonderful. Corn has the ability to hold my diet hostage. So it as it seems the other options seem very bleak, I think that I will embrace my poptarts, and simply accept the fact that a corn-free lifestyle would involve me being anorexic and extremely unhappy.

So what are we supposed to do about this situation? We cannot go cold turkey off corn. Farmers would lose their jobs and we would be left with nothing to eat. Our dependence on corn is so great that its hard to change. When we discussed the farm bill in class, it showed me the amount of money invested in corn.  From here, it seems like the situation is a bit hopeless. We could slowly ease ourselves off corn, but the fact of the matter is, not enough people know about this growing problem. And now I wonder if that is better; Is ignorance bliss?

Ch. 10 analysis

Claim: Grass represents different things to different people and things and it is the source of almost everything.

Grounds: In 1984, Allan Nation heard sheep ranchers refer themselves as grass farmers. The simplest way to capture the suns energy in a form food animals can use is by growing grass. People see grass as background.

Warrant: If everything on the farm eats grass or uses it as a means to develop, then grass is the true source of everything and it should be appreciated and taken care of.

Backing: “Grass farmers grow animals –for meat, eggs, milk, and wool – but regard them as part of a food chain in which grass is the keystone species, the nexus between the solar energy that powers every food chain and the animals we eat.” “The animals come and go, but the grasses, which directly or indirectly feed all animals, abide, and the well-being of the farm depends more than anything else on the well-being of its grass.”

Qualifier: Grass is the base of the farm. The animals eat it, the crops need it to grow, and the farmers need it to survive. A fresh pasture is the start of a farm. Grass is used to harness the sun’s energy, which in turn gets eaten by the animals.

Rebuttal: Grass is not actually profitable and does not sell in today’s market. By putting so much time and effort into it, the farmers might be hurting themselves.