I’ve been thinking a lot about my food recently. With all the items on my newsfeed about GMO this, and “grow it yourself” that, I am finding myself very focused on what it took for my food to get to me. The chicken breast I ate for lunch was part of a creature that lived for six months. The carrot that followed it into my mouth grew for 3 months. I destroyed them both in a matter of minutes.
I’m not saying I have guilt over it or anything. I am very selfish about my life, and will continue to demolish as necessary to maintain it. I just think that I, personally, have had a tendency to blindly eat, and not appreciate what it is that is going into my body.
One of the few specific things I remember from my Macro-Economics class is Malthus’s theory that our growing population would use up Earth’s resources to the point where famine would kill enough of us off that we would be down to supportable numbers. I suppose the cycle, in his theory, would be endless. Ah, but he didn’t know about crop science, vitamin supplements, and our ability and desire to draw every last bit of use out of the ground. He also didn’t foresee that in places food is plentiful our population growth is lower than places where food is lacking. He didn’t see that only part of the world would be subject to the devastating famines and disease. Even science can’t solve everything when we are so determined to destroy ourselves, or allow others to be destroyed.
I don’t object to genetic modification. We have been doing it since we planted the first wild harvested seed in a place of our own choosing, when we became farmers instead of nomads. I object to taking for granted the lives we use to sustain us, whether it be plant or animal. I object to people going hungry, when I can buy crap from a vending machine for what they make in a month. I don’t object to money, or that some people have more than others through their own efforts and sacrifices. I object to the speed at which we race on through life, to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, while losing all sight of whatever it was we were reaching for in the first place, and why. I object to most of us having no concept or interest in what is happening to other real people, but being so engaged in “Sister Wives” and “My Strange Addiction”.
I don’t know the answers. I don’t even know most of the questions. I just know that I don’t want to be blind and ungrateful to my world.
Nice <3