Food/Food Inc

"Permaculture emphasizes the use of perennial plants rather than annuals and avoids disturbing the soil by digging and plowing. Chickens and other animals have a variety of roles to play including nutrient cycling, pest control, and food production and are often part of permaculture farms." (Robertson, 2014)

I think that this is a really good concept in theory but I don’t know how practical this would be in today’s society. The larger scale producers of meats and grains would not be able to produce the quantity that they do if they couldn’t plow the ground and had to only rely on perennial plants. It also seems that it would cost them much more money than what they are spending now to produce their crops and of course they wouldn’t want to spend more money when they don’t have to. I think this would be a good practice for small self sustaining farms or farms that produce small quantities of things. It should be a relatively easy switch for them to implement this idea with out to much money spent.

Permaculture posted on eco-evolution

The first wow moment that I could think of in the Food Inc movie was when they were talking about how farmers could be sued if some of Mosantos seeds blew onto their land, even if the farmer wasn’t using them. A farmer shouldn’t be penalized if the wind or animals pick up seed somewhere else and bring it to their property. It would be almost impossible for the farmers to tell the difference between the two seeds unless they tested every plant that was growing. Plus Mosanto is a big enough company that if this where to happen they could almost sue the farmer out of their farm and therefore destroying their lives. We are almost punishing people for wanting to produce their own crops instead of selling their land to a big company and that doesn’t seem right at all.

Corn Field posted on pinterest

The second wow moment was the drop in food safety inspections by the FDA. It said that there has been a drop by almost 42,000 in only 30 years which is ridiculous. The way we produce food now there should be more inspections done because there seems to be a lot more deadly disease outbreaks. The way most of our food is produce helps bread diseases and we are just willing letting them go unchecked. There should be more legislation in place that says the factories that produce our food should at least be check once a year. This would cut down on outbreaks and would lead to a better quality of food produced. Its crazy that we don’t think that we deserve at least disease free food.

FDA food inspection posted on marlerblog.com

Robertson, M. (2014). Sustainability Principles and Practice. New York, NY: Routledge.