I just got finished watching the Future of Food and boy did it get me riled up. I can't help but get angry when watching movies like this about our food system. This one was almost as bad as Food, Inc. which is another great movie that everyone should watch. The Future of Food focuses mostly on genetically modified foods and the big nasty impact they can have. It's all pretty disgusting and I hate the way things are headed.
I just can't stand that big seed companies like Monsanto get patents on their GM seeds, farmers use those seeds, the plants spread to other fields, farmers who never wanted the GM plants find them in their fields, Monsanto finds those plants and since they have a patent they can sue the farmer for patent infringement even though the farmer never wanted those plants on their field. Farmers have no way of keeping seeds from contaminating their crops but are still at the mercy of the big companies that have the seed patents. I hate that these companies are gaining tons of control and influence over our food. We're losing genetic diversity of our crops if farmers are basically forced to buy seeds from these companies to avoid harassment by these companies.
It drives me crazy that these genetically modified foods aren't even labeled! How can we possibly avoid them if we don't know what they are? I guess the most foolproof way of avoiding GMOs at the moment is to buy directly from farmers who don't use genetically modified plants through things such as CSA programs and farmer's markets. I'd love to see our food controlled by sustainable farmers instead of these big companies who are ruining the lives of the small farmers, destroying biological diversity that is so essential to protecting us from famine and disease, and doing untold things to the health of our bodies.
There's definitely a lot more that is discussed in the movie, so for more information on all of this, check out their website. It looks like you can watch the whole thing straight from there.
This is a little bit of a tangent, but when writing this I have to say that I was a little disgusted to find that the spell check recognizes Monsanto as a real word. Walmart is not even recognized. How crazy influential does a company have to be to get it's name in spell checks?
I believe the GM foods are in fact labeled, you just have to know how to read the 4 digit numbers that are put on the produce. If I remember correctly anything that starts with a '4' is GM and anything that starts with a '5' is not. I think you can double check this by looking at the numbers on the organic foods and compared them to the non-organic foods.
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