Happy Earth Day! I say that with more than a hint of sarcasm since most of the Earth Day messages I've gotten these past few days have come from companies. Did you know that L.A. is the 8th least wasteful city? I saw that mentioned on latimes.com today and clicked through to the original story in Good Magazine. But on closer inspection, this is not news. It's results from a poll by Nalgene of a few thousand people in the 25 largest cities. If you take the environmental quiz yourself, you get 25% off a new Nalgene product.
Then there was this even more egregious story in my Everything Long Beach e-mail today: 10 tips for using technology to go green!! From Verizon!! Tip #8: Use Verizon's VZ Navigator so you don't get lost and waste gas. I know companies are spitting out these press releases but that it ended up as a "story" in my inbox is insulting.
But I didn't spend too much time dwelling on the inevitable of companies trying to make money off Earth Day because I spent my evening watching Food, Inc. on PBS. The documentary investigates food production practices and their impact on health and the environment. A lot of it was familiar since I've read one of Michael Pollan's books (he's featured in the doc). But the sight of thousands of chickens crammed into a chicken house, sitting in their own feces and too weak to stand up because they'd been injected with hormones to make them grow faster ... well, it was disturbing. So was the sight of pigs being killed and cows being processed but I don't eat meat or pork so I got to feel self-righteous during those parts.
It was crazy to see just how much meat these companies are processing. At the largest pig processing plant in the country, they slaughter 23,000 pigs a day. Obviously when companies are raising, killing and processing that amount of meat, bad things are going to happen (e-coli outbreaks, for example).
So what to do? After reading Pollan's book I tried to buy free range chicken from Whole Foods but after a while it got expensive so I stopped. I think the component I was missing was trying to eat less meat. Americans consume way more meat today than in the past because modern practices (and corn subsidies) have made the meat cheaper. I do it too. Last week I bought 2 1/2 pounds of chicken because it was on sale. What does one girl living alone need with that much meat? But if I eat less of it, my hope is that the cost of buying the quality stuff will even out. It was like the one farmer in Food, Inc. said. People would come to his farm and complain about how much his chickens cost while holding a soda in their hands. We've gotta think more about how we want to spend our money and what we're spending it on instead of being sucked in by the marketing of these giant food companies.
That's the point of Earth Day, right? Raising awareness. Not buying a Nalgene bottle or GPS system.
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