Pay-It-Forward Friday
March 9th, 2010
I want Friday’s to bring awareness to other organizations that are doing wonderful things for animals. If you have information you want to share, send me a paragraph on the topic with a link to the website, by 11am on Thursday. I will do this each Friday. Please pass this link on to bring awareness to these wonderful organizations, thanks!
1. Have you ever thought about the food you eat? How does it affect your body and health?
There is a new movie called Food, Inc. It educates people about the food they eat. Oprah dedicated one of her shows to this topic. Alicia Silverstone wrote a book called “The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet”. She also discusses this topic.
When we used to cook quality food at home our health care costs, and medical needs, were much lower. Our world has changed. People buy fast food an average of 4 times a week. With that increase there has been an increase in health issues and health care costs. Animals are force fed and given all kinds of hormones. This impacts the animals, as well as the humans that consume them. A few of the topics discussed in the movie:
- Where our food comes from
- How it affects our health
- How to purchase quality food at the best price
- Restaurants that serve high quality food that has been raised caged free
What are your thoughts about this? You can comment below.
2. They say bears hibernate in the winter, right? Watch the video below to see what they really do in the comfort of their own caves! This is live video inside a bear’s den!
A team of biologists go to a black bear den to study a female bear and her two newborn cubs. The group recorded each cub’s weight and gender and examined the mother bear. Please listen to what they have to say about the bears and humans interacting. Sound familiar about other animals in the wild?
THESE ARE WILD ANIMALS, PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS ON YOUR OWN!!
3. Kirsten Starcher plays bass in a Vancouver-based rock band and while performing in Toronto, Canada in 2006, took a poignant photograph of a homeless man with his dog nestled in his arms. Her photo has touched many hearts around the world. Her consent to “Pets of the Homeless” to use her photo set a wave in motion.
“Years later, it still amazes me how this one tiny action, which almost didn’t happen, has had a ripple effect I never would have predicted,” wrote Kirsten for an article in the March 2010, Pets of the Homeless Newsletter.
People started writing to tell Kirsten about how the photo affected them. More charities asked to use it in their writings; artists asked to paint their own versions of it; a musician wrote a song about it. She received email from a woman in South Africa who found it on a flyer on the beach and was deeply moved. One of the artists planned to give a percentage of his gallery’s earnings – for a month – to a local homelessness charity, by way of appreciation.
This stunning photograph can be seen on the Pets of the Homeless website.
Apart from producing your own food I think there is a huge difference between the time our great grand parents spend on cooking a healthy meal and the time families nowadays spend on putting food on the table. I for one moved from The Netherlands to Bolivia and by far prefer the Bolivian food which I agree is a lot fresher for being grown in the region (even the tropics are nearby so the fruit is also great) but also people do spend a lot more time in the kitchen to prepare something tasty.
Some foods tasted better in our grandparents day, at least when fresh. My mother used to tell how delicious milk was just after it was milked (she was speaking of her grandparents’ farm in Vermont where she was born)
Today, milk, apple cider, and many other foods are pasteurized or heat treated in some way, which kills dangerous pathogens but also takes away much of the taste. I know apple cider doesn’t taste the same since it has been required to be pasteurized, about 5 or 10 years ago.,
Great discussion. Here are my comments:
1. CAFO – animals who are feed grain and don’t get to walk are much higher in fat and that fat is the worst kind – grass fed meat is better if you eat meat, eggs or dairy you can search out local sources who allow the animals access to grass
2. soil health is also compromised by use of fossil fuel inputs you listed as harmful to human health
3. coal burning is #1 source of mercury in our airsheds
4. having our food come from only a handful of companies is a monopoly situation and must be addressed – in our grandparents day there were over 250 types of apples grown -now there are perhaps 9 “commercial” varieties and the older varities are disapearing
5. yes fresh is best, eating in season, delayed gratification, that anticipation that comes from waiting for the strawberries to become available locally instead of buying those out of season
6. salt has got a bad rap but if folks ate mostly fresh foods instead of fast food-processed foods everything would be different – I have been reading about something called metabolic disorder – a systems approach to wellness is in order, healthy soils make healthy food make health people – simple in concept but it’s the opposite of our industrial food system.
I had the opportunity to listen to Mr. Joel Salatin, Polyface Farms, speak on this issue last week and one of the things he points out regarding major trends in technology development (food included) that we often to not consider is that innovation often precedes the infrastructure to support it by 20-30 years. In the case of our food, we began mass producing food in cities before we had available electricity, waste disposal technology, or even stainless steel. Therefore, there were mass food related issues in our grandparents times (the early 1900s) that could not be resolved because of lagging technology.
Today, we have ample technology to allow home and regionally produced food to be properly prepared and preserved, thus eliminating the health risks that critics of regional food production fear. We need to do a better job of education about this issue. Check our our non-profit group http://www.eclonomics.org to see how we are proposing to deal with these types of issues.
I guess it depends what country country or where in the US our grandparents came from, and if they grew up on a farm or had their own plot of land!
My mother’s father’s parents had a prosperous farm on the Lake Champlain Islands. The food they ate was better for many reasons-
1. The animals had not been bred to give high fat content as our meat is, therefore they had a lower risk of heart disease
2. Pesticides, herbicides and preservatives were not used on the vegetables, fruits and grains
3. The fish from the lake did not have mercury in it
4. The had varied vegetables from the several acre “kitchen garden” which was tended to by the women.
5. Their food quality was not impacted due to not having refrigeration.
6. A lot of salt was ingested, through meat that had been smoked to preserve it.
My grandfather told me several times that he had worked for a year in a meatpacking plant in Troy,NY in 1919 and from the way he described the conditions the people who ate that meat were not eating that healthy.
My mother’s mother grew up in rural Ireland, in a fairly prosperous family for that time and place (Pre – WW I), Her father was retired from the British army. The had the the proverbial potato patch and chickens out back. They certainly did not have a particularly balanced or ample diet, But their diet was certainly not going to promote heart disease, or type II diabetes.
My father’s parents grew up in villages in Southern Italy around 1890-1910. I’m sure they did not have the best or most ample diet, and I assume their food was not always the best preserved. My guess would be that they may have had difficulty getting all the calcium needed for proper growth (not dairy country)
I have very little to add to the thoughtful comments, but for me what’s at the heart of the issue is the distance from farm to table.
A lot more people should see this post. I will pass it around. I live in Russia and you should see how animals are treated here.
Have you heard of “Slow Food International” and “Slow Food USA”? It promotes the local-shopping and home-cooking of food in addition to the social joy of eating with friends and family–just the opposite of “fast food”. Find your local farmer’s market and get to know what’s in season, or start a garden in your back yard, learn the rhythms of nature.
And I’m so glad people are helping homeless people and their pets instead of criticizing them.
Very powerful
I would like to congratulate you for the initiative.
I believe that people like you deserve recognition by the authorities, the breeders and by the society.
The work that you do is a great victory for humanity, because it shows that there are still people who cares about this relationship, that is so important, of man and nature!
I wish you much luck and success on this so difficult road that is the preservation and welfare of animals and I appreciate if you talk some more about your show and how my company (Pet Society.net) can contribute to this fight!
Thomaz, Brazil
I like animals and want to make their own efforts to protect animals from harm around.I live in a place, China’s Guangdong Province, many people eat rare animals as a hobby.Although I do not change around so many of the bad habits, but we hope to make their own efforts to do something.I hope that one day the law, and the animals are equal.
After seeing footage like this, I have not been able to eat meat or chicken, unless I know where it came from. If more people would stop eating at restaurants, unless the restaurant gets their food from companies that raise animals humanly, we would be healthier and the animals would have better lives.
I liked the cub video too.
It’s so good to see that there are restaurants that do pay attention to where our food comes from and makes changes so protect animals, and our health.
The cub video was very cute. Thanks for sharing this information with us.
You are what you eat
Loved the bear’s den
What a great movie about the food we eat!! I look forward to seeing the whole movie. I also enjoyed seeing the cubs. They are so cute but you are right, not something anyone should do on their own. Thanks.