FoodInc.

Everyone should go see this movie. Run, do not walk, to the nearest theater, and watch it. It's short (only an hour and a half) but well, well-worth the price of admission.

For those of you not hip enough to work for natural and organic food retailers or otherwise inclined to know anything at all about the American food supply business, FoodInc. is a rather disgusting look at the ways we produce food in this country, and all the things that are wrong with that process.






Up front, I will say (because I am a natural skeptic) that I am not convinced that 100% of everything presented in this movie is true. Like other documentaries of recent years (say, everything every done by Michael Moore) I'm sure the filmmakers cherry-picked the footage that made it to the finished version, and that means that the finished version is probably decidedly one-sided.

Still, there are some gems of facts in there.

For example, did you know that there are only 12 slaughterhouse/meatpacking plants left in the country? TWELVE. Forty years ago, there were thousands.

The Smithfield meat packing plant is operated almost exclusively by illegal immigrants... but no more than 15 a day are picked up by immigration officials.

Junk food is cheap on the shelf, because we subsidize the hell out of corn and soybeans. So it isn't actually cheap.

There are fish farms out there that are trying to teach fish to eat corn. Why? Corn is cheap.

Trying to food cows corn is what has produced such lovely fuzzy things as hemorrhagic e.coli backeria.

I told you it was scary.

However, it also got me thinking about a few things, tangentially.

For example, so many people I know say they don't bother to pay for "organic" food because the label is meaningless. That's actually completely false. "Organic" as a food label is very, very strictly monitored by the FDA. In a nutshell, foods labeled organic must be from non-genetically modified seeds that have been grown in fields that have been free of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for at least three years. Meat labeled organic must be from animals that have not been genetically modified and that have been fed food that could be sold to consumers as organic under FDA guidelines, and cannot have been exposed to synthetic hormones or antibiotics.

I think that most people think that the organic label is meaningless because they have a romantic vision for organic farms that is very similar to the romantic vision of conventional farms- individual farmers using common-sense, sustainable practices to produce good food without the addition of all the technology that is available to agribusiness farms.




But farming practices are not regulated by the FDA, and quite frankly shouldn't be. Furthermore, organic certification for a farm is expensive. For the kind of small farmer that we envision, it is prohibitively expensive. And it's a yearly expenditure- you have to renew certification every year.

This means that the only people who can afford organic certification, and thus sell their food as organic, are the same kind of large-scale, disgustingly unsustainable agribusiness farms that produce conventional food. It's trucked around the country and around the world before it makes it to your supermarket and then your dinner table.

And so people think the label is meaningless.

It's not meaningless, it just doesn't mean what many people think it ought to mean in their pink-rose-colored-world.

If you really want good food grown well, you should be buying direct from farmers that you can see and talk to and visit. Go to farmer's markets. Sign up for a community supported agriculture share. Can and preserve what you can't eat fresh so that you have food all year round.

It's really that simple.

You don't get to have the wholesomeness we've lost in our food supply and retain the convenience that it's been replaced with. You have to pick one or the other.

Which would you rather have?

Men are from Mars...

There is no space travel here, FYI.

So recently, the Manfriend informed me that one of his friends (not a good friend, but an old one) is getting married later in the summer and that he assumed I wouldn't want to go and that he's taking his mother as his date.

That's actually a very truncated snapshot of the whole picture.

He assumed I wouldn't want to go because his ex is standing up in the wedding, and she and I (or rather, her sister and I?) have already had one completely bizarre and moderately unpleasant run-in in recent months. Looking back, the whole thing makes even less sense than it did at the time. I ran into the two of them at a baby store, and the sister threatened to "punch that bitch in the face." She was looking at me when she said it; I assumed she was talking about me. But, the ex is happily married to another man and has (a really rather adorable) baby boy, so I don't know why any of them would care that I'm dating the Manfriend.

No sense, I'm telling you.

Maybe she wasn't talking to me. Even though she was looking at me.

Anyway, there was this incident a few months ago, so he assumed I wouldn't want to go to a wedding that his ex would be at.

I don't think he should have assumed that.

And if he doesn't want me to be at an event she's at, why doesn't he just say that, instead of couching it in pseudo-considerate and mildly condescending terms?

On the other hand, his mother has known the groom for upwards of 20 years, and didn't actually get her own invitation to the wedding, so maybe he just wanted to take her to be nice to her.

But if that's the case, why not just say that?

And furthermore, I was supposed to attend another friend's wedding with him previously, but he backed out of that one, too.

Which leaves me with this icky idea at the back of my head that I'm like the red-headed-step-child of girlfriends and he's hiding me. I don't think there's anything so wrong with me that I need to be sheltered away from polite society. Really, I'm nothing to be ashamed of. I have the requisite number of limbs and brain cells.

So I'm curious about the full reasoning behind the decision-making process, both assuming I wouldn't want to attend and immediately inviting his mother to be his date.

But I've been informed by several (male) friends that doing so would be "cling" or "controlling" and that I should "pick my battles." I'm not trying to fight a battle. I'm curious. And he is perfectly welcome to go without me, but I would really like to know the why. And have it explained to me.

My female friends tell me to just ask, because there's no harm in satisfying curiousity.

Is this a gender thing? Should I ask, or should I bite my tongue? And if I do inquire, how do I go about it in such a way as to make it clear I'm not picking a fight, not demanding he take me with him, not being clingy or controlling?

Creative juices.

Creativity is a finite resource. Or, at the very least, my creativity is a finite resource. It runs dry. I have none left.

Or, at least, I have none left for blogging. My creativity is being spent in various other pursuits at the moment. I'm decorating a room. Also plotting an installation piece for a hallway. Also helping my mother with her decorating projects. Also helping my father completely remodel a bathroom.

And then there's the baby, who requires ever-more-creative entertainment with each passing day. I swear to god, she gets bored of things more quickly than I do. A thing will engross her completely and utterly for an hour, a day, sometimes a week, but then its over, and something else must be found.

On that note, the current entertainment is walking the block. We must have made 50 trips up and down yesterday. My leg muscles are so fatigued they quiver when I stand.

Dodging the family's questions about the Manfriend is requiring more and more creativity as time goes on, too.

And then there's this fundraiser/clothes swap that I've been designated the organizer for. Does anyone have any creative ideas on where to get 25 or so clothing racks that doesn't involve the outlay of any money?

I think that the difference between an artist and a hobbyist is how the creative juices flow. Hobbyists are like me. There's a finite well, and it can only be routed into so many channels before all of them end up dry. Artists, on the other hand, feed on their own creative energies. The expending of those energies generates more energy which can be used to feed more channels and it just keeps multiplying and multiplying, and never runs dry completely. This branch or that branch might wither away, but the tree as a whole remains healthy and flourishing.

(Did I mix enough metaphors there? Trees, rivers, brain conduits. I could probaby have used a fourth if I weren't so burned out.)

It's kind of depressing to realize one is just a hobbyist.

Then again, I work with spreadsheets all day, keeping books and balancing bank accounts. It shouldn't really come as a surprise to me that I'm not actually an artist.