For my Eye Opener post this week I decided to Take a Tour of the Food Supply to receive helpful tips on how to eat green.
When window first opened to the webpage I had a little laugh due to the animal sounds the website provides. On the website there were many areas to receive information when it comes to the process of raising cattle and other farm animals. I will be honest, I do feel the website was slightly biased when it comes to the topic and that they seem to be completely against raising livestock for food consumption. What gives me that impression is the terms they use throughout the webpage, terms such as 'foul' and 'smelly.' I also noticed the only information the webpage provided were ways that the livestock industry is harming the environment and made no point to mention what precautions farmers are taking to run a green farm.
The most surprising fact, to me, mentioned that the overall cost of diet-related diseases costs an annual sum of approximately $90 billion. In addition, the cost of drugs to reduce health conditions such as high cholesterol levels is about $30 billion dollars a year. As high as this number is I do have a hard time believing that this is a result solely due to citizens consuming meat and dairy products; which was the impression I received from the website. Some individuals, for instance, have poor health conditions due to their family genes.
I do feel I need to disclose that my family does raise beef for a living so that is probably why I am noticing the lack of healthy environmental facts when it comes to livestock farms.
Please do not misinterpret what I am saying. I know there are ways that livestock farms are being detrimental to the environment and that the facts the website is presenting should be brought to people's attention. What I am trying to say is that now all farms are run this way and that there are farms trying to reduce their ecological footprint as well.
I toured the same website as you. There was a lot of surprising information to me, as well. I also found the $90 billion diet-related illnesses to be quite shocking.
ReplyDeleteI see where you are coming from. My dad raised livestock until I was about ten, so I was raised on the meat those cows produced. I think there can be a big difference between small family farms and big corporations when it comes to the environment. There ARE farmers out there that are doing their best to help.
ReplyDeleteI totally feel the same. My dad raises feeder cattle and it's hard to see all the biases, but there are some farms that take the right precautions too.
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a very good point Sonny. I took the eating green calculator quiz and I got my results, then I went back to "improve my diet" and I changed most of my servings to 1 or even 0 for some, and it still gave me bad results. I felt as though the website was slightly biased in a sense that not everyone lives, or wants to live, a vegetarian lifestyle. It seemed as though unless you had 0 for all the categories you weren't going to get a "good" score.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I do see the bias in the website now that you bring it up. It is unrealistic to think that the world is just going to stop eating meat because everyone says it's "bad".
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