Sustainability - The Omnivore's Dilemma

If there is one thing this book has sort of reinforced is the reason why we industrialized food in the first place instead of sticking to less mechanical means. Because it's cheap, and organic living cannot be managed on a mass scale.

I hate to say this, but when I read that Whole Foods has virtually fallen into the same trap as the rest of the industrialized food industry, I was rather amused. Why? That's certainly not a good thing, but it goes to show that no matter how righteous one feels about saving the animals and providing organic fruits, you're still not much better than the industrial machine. They tried to fight it and they pretty much failed.

Because you cannot ship organic foods straight from the farm, across country, to a grocery store! Everything, thus, has to be local if you want straight organic foods and that simply is not possible, at all, for every city. Where is New York going to get their organic foods if there can't be any preservatives? Are there enough farms around there to feed 8 million people (I don't even know how many people live in New York. That's just a ballpark figure and it's probably very wrong) and the rest of the surrounding area? I'm pretty sure farm lands are in short supply up there. Not that they don't exist but that they cannot possibly produce enough to feed that many people. And even if they do, what about the surrounding areas? They'd just starve?

To be quite frank, though, I seriously doubt anyone is going to be able to get rid of the food industry completely. It may produce extremely unhealthy foods and have animal abuse (I love animals too and I think the FDA should look this more closely!), but it does make food on a mass enough scale to feed the 300,000,000+ in our population.

I guess you could rightly call this my primary criticism of this book. It's saying a lot about how good Joel Salatin's farm is, how much it produces, and how it produces but it is not saying anything about how we can transport this. Other than the fact that Joel Salatin refuses to go beyond local.

This is probably what I find annoying about quite a few environmentalist writings that we've read. They totally ignore practical reasons as to why Salatin's way farming hasn't spread like wildfire to other farmers. He seems to be making a decent living. And part of that is because it simply is not practical! Organic food can't be shipped! Or isn't supposed to be shipped because they prohibit the use of preservatives.

Durning did the same thing, because I criticized his article which was so bent on proving the American people are ill with consumerism, that he totally ignored the fact that happiness is quite largely based on job satisfaction. He was so certain materialism is the sole cause of happiness that he completely ignored how job satisfaction is pretty much at an all time low. Big business has CEOs that keep awarding themselves huge bonuses and severance checks(even for doing a crappy job), and meanwhile their poor employee on the lowest rung of the ladder is constantly ignored and withheld bonuses despite working 40+ hours a week. Yes, NOTHING wrong or even pessimistic about that picture at all. (See? I'm not a capitalist through and through. Unregulated capitalism is horrible! Ergo, our current financial crisis right now.)

Michael Clayton

Ah, a pretty good film about how a man topples an evil corporation that did its best to obscure, mask, and road block its opponents into a stalemate and eventually achieving its aims: paying little to the plaintiffs while continuing to market their obviously harmful product, because the amount of money coming into the CEOs overrules the money that would go into fixing said product into something safer. But, still, first and foremost this film is not about some...not really lawyer person doing the morally good thing and bringing down the company for the good of the planet.

He managed to turn his conversation with Karen Crowder at the end into a confession of nearly killing him and definitely killing his charge Arthur. It's all about revenge. George Clooney had no other motivation to bring down this company other than the fact that he suspected someone had killed Arthur. It only turned really, truly personal when they stupidly tried to kill him. Of course the evil henchmen screwed up. They always do!

Since I'm a media student, I'll go ahead and just focus on the technical aspects of the film, namely the story. Touched on above, I can't tell if the film would have been better if it was started right at the beginning of the trouble or if it hadn't shown us the future and double-backed. I mean, it does say "4 days earlier" not long after the car bomb and cars don't usually explode. Obviously, someone was trying to kill him. We don't even have to get halfway through the film before we can recognize the enemy as the evil company. Obviously the evil company attempted to kill him so that they could more effectively clean up the mess their rogue lawyer made.

I guess you could argue that it made for an enticing beginning, to draw the audience in and make them want to stay, but it's a film about lawyers! Everyone hates lawyers! It will eventually get pretty boring and...it was. It was a little boring. And a little annoying. I kinda wish the little boy hadn't factored in at all and I'm not sure what his purpose was anyway. Was the boy's fantasy book (geez, was it Realm & Conquerors?) really that important to the story? I was under the impression that Arthur, as crazy as he was, always had a tangible idea of what was going on with that company and he proved his genius, if not his recklessness, during that scene where he calls - I'm not even sure who. He called someone merely for the soul purpose of heckling the people obviously listening in on his phone calls - and shouted about the kind of choice language that people within the company should write to avoid incrimination in lawsuits, particularly this one.

Smart, crazy man.

But, it's pretty obvious by this time that since the company listened in on this particular conversation, that this lawyer is in fact doing his best to win the lawsuit for their clients. Well, that would ruin their reputation and they would lose too much money, so they decide to go ahead and kill the annoying flies that pester them.

So, you go to all that trouble to make sure Arthur dies in a suicide, and yet you sloppily attempt to kill George Clooney with a car bomb? Not only did it fail but, as I said above, cars just don't blow up! It would be rather obvious that someone rigged it to blow and since Clooney just cleared himself of his debtors...who else would want to kill him? Man, this company is not very subtle.

At any rate, it is still a decent movie. Not especially thought-provoking since the basic premise of man overcoming evil business has been done before. I kinda wish they had gone more into the nature aspect of the movie, where a business obviously ignored laws and inflicted harm not only on the environment but on human life. But the whole violation of nature and its destruction was more of an irrelevant detail than anything significant and the movie was focused far more on how evil businesses will do personal harm in their eagerness to escape prosecution and lawsuits.

Even so, I still prefer V for Vendetta. Bundles a nice package of food for thought with incredible imagery and plenty of action.