Industrial Harvest

I’m back in Seattle, back to juggling dayjob and art, back to drizzle and not knowing when to wake up because you can’t tell when it’s actually daylight…

In other words, I’m trying to maintain all the momentum from back in December and it’s been a little bit of a struggle.  Fortunately, my husband and I watched Food, Inc. last night which fueled my determination to keep at it.  If you haven’t seen this documentary it’s not what I’d call a fun movie, but there are plenty of inspiring parts and it’s basically your duty as a citizen to watch it.  If it doesn’t change the way you eat, nothing will. 

At the beginning of December, my friend T sent me this email after I told her about this project.  Her comment:  “Interesting dream as it was so much a succinct picture of reality.”  Indeed, it poetically mirrors some of what Food, Inc. had to say quite nicely: 

“Your project brings to mind a dream I had in September. In the dream I was looking to buy a plot of land.  I found one nearby to a gas station with ‘Genetic’ on the sign.  As I was planning out my garden spots in my minds eye, I was taken to the land just up over the hill then rolled along a conveyor belt and shown the industrial agricultural mechanism taking place all around me.  Men in suits spraying golden fields of wheat as far as the eye could see, wheat being dumped into a machine and coming out as cheerios that got dumped into big trucks; sweaty red necked men, scrawny men with clipboards.  There was more to the dream, including me having a birds’ eye view of a farmer’s family fighting their insurance company for medical care.”

Some of the scenes in Food, Inc are nearly as surreal; the one difference is that farmers were fighting Tysons and Monsanto rather than the health insurance company.  When you’re a farmer and you’re $400,000 deep in legal fees due to harrassing lawsuits from THE MAN you better hope you don’t get sick, cuz you sure don’t have health insurance.  The one thing that came through loud and clear in this movie is that these corporations are literally out to torment and humiliate all who stand in their way of complete market domination and relentless pursuit of profit.  Animals, workers and small farmers alike. 

The one great thing about all this is that we can affect changes in this system every time we sit down to dinner.  Remember that.  Where you shop and what you buy matters a lot.