Filed under: Cuisine, Economics, Health, Literature, Moscow, Movies, Politics, Religion
Last week, I had the rare pleasure of watching movies at both of Moscow’s vintage cinemas. Thursday, I attended a showing of the subtly titled Food Inc. at the Kenworthy, followed by a Saturday viewing of Collision at the Nuart. Both were worthwhile excuses for a night on the town.
Food Inc.
For years, I have found myself following close after the “green” bandwagon. When jumping on, I have kept near the edge, neither educating myself in depth nor being drawn into its stereotypical fanaticism. I believe in a moderate approach to stewardship, especially when it is cheap and easy, hence my recent recycling kick. Mere conscience plays its role, but there is no shortage of examples (“global warming” aside) where irresponsibility in such matters has come full circle with harmful consequences. Food Inc. aims to identify those consequences as they relate to our industrial food chain.
To accept the premise of this movie, one must be willing to ask where food comes from – a question that would have gotten strange looks only a few generations ago. Today, the question has become equally absurd: “Food comes from the store, silly!” Unprecedented variety in what we eat has become commonplace to the point we expect – as if by right – that the markets of the world be at our fingertips upon entering the magical doors of a grocery outlet.
In addition to where our food comes from, one must wonder how it gets to us. By this, I don’t mean the transportation required (though that is worth considering). I mean the ethics, the politics, and the economics. If one assumes the honest and infallible oversight of a higher power (a.k.a. the FDA) when ordering from a drive-thru, then there is no reason to doubt that the chicken nuggets I am being handed arrived by any path other than one that was fair to the chickens, their farmers, and me. If I suspect this may not be the case, Food Inc. suggests I might be right.
For example, genetic and dietetic alterations of poultry in the last thirty years have allowed farmers to grow their birds to twice the normal size in half the natural time. That’s great for business, but is it animal cruelty if its legs can’t support its own weight? A chicken house under contract by one of the few major meat companies in the U.S. contains tens of thousands of chickens that can’t walk.
Before I give you the wrong impression, the movie spends little time on animal treatment and is not out to make the viewer a vegetarian. Instead, most of the focus is where it rightly should be: on the farmer, the factory worker, and the consumer. According to producer and director Robert Kenner, big business and big government have created a well-oiled agricultural machine that persecutes honest farmers, exploits immigrant laborers, puts factory workers at unnecessary risk, and takes advantage of consumers.
The movie touches on these topics and others – notably the associated health problems – without going into much detail on any one subject. Counter-industry experts like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are featured to boost the movie’s credentials, while most of the organizations villainized by the documentary refused to provide an interview. The result is a largely one-sided, yet reasonably believable unveiling of what I am buying into at the checkout counter. Conclusions are implied, but rather than telling me where to spend my money, the questions raised leave the real research up to me.
Food Inc. alleges that the low price on much of our food is false advertising – that we are being lied to. As a capitalist, when shown the dark side of an industry, I am hesitant to blame the “system.” Without excusing the dishonesty and corruption that undoubtedly exist, I believe the bigger problem is ignorant consumers – myself included – who never bother to ask the questions of where our food (or any product) comes from and how. Like democracy, the beauty of a free market is also its vulnerability: the consumer decides. A dollar spent is a vote cast, and who we elect to supply our food affects everything from animal treatment to personal well-being.
This topic is particularly relevant with Thanksgiving and Christmas on the way. Of course, we have much to be thankful for, including the sheer volume of food available to us and the technology that makes it possible. But it is also important to recognize the choices we unavoidably make when shopping for the holidays and throughout the year, to be grateful for a market that makes those choices possible, and to express that gratitude by exercising our spending power wisely, whether that is through selecting low-priced items to fit within a limited budget or investing a little extra on trustworthy products.
I recommend Food Inc. to anyone curious about what they eat. The DVD was released on November third. Watch the trailer and read more about the movie by clicking here.
Collision
Speaking of thanksgiving, pastor Douglas Wilson considers it key when debating the existence of God, as he does with atheist Christopher Hitchens in the much anticipated documentary Collision: Is Christianity Good for the World. In the companion book, which publishes the initial internet exchange between Hitchens and Wilson, the latter writes:
“The issue of thanksgiving is really central to the whole debate about the existence of God. On the one hand, if there is no God, there is no need to thank anyone. We are here as the result of a long chain of impersonal processes, grinding their way down to our brief moment in time. If there is a God, then every breath, every moment, every sight and sound, is sheer, unadulterated gift.”
Not only does Hitchens disagree with Wilson that the Christian God exists – he maintains that there is no such thing as the supernatural, that all deities are unnecessary and distracting inventions (to say the least), and that mankind would be much better off without them. Hitchens invokes William F. Buckley in writing:
“I myself believe that the duel between [religion] and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between [liberty] and [totalitarianism] is the same struggle reproduced on another level… I should not conceal the fact that I am not so much an atheist as an anti-theist. I am, in other words, not one of those unbelievers who wishes they had faith, or that they could believe. I am, rather, someone who is delighted that there is absolutely no persuasive evidence for the existence of any of mankind’s many thousands of past and present deities.”
The debate that follows has less to do with the particulars of Christianity as it does with the basis of our reason and morality. Wilson argues that the divinely revealed character of a creator provides the absolute, unchanging foundation upon which we are able to make rational and ethical judgments. He then proceeds to press his opponent for a defense of innate solidarity as a binding moral authority. Hitchens responds with a humble yet well-crafted appeal to the human ego that turns the table on Christianity by denouncing its pivotal doctrine of vicarious atonement as not only incredible, but immoral; yet he is “content to regard [virtue] as indefinable.”
The book is a quick read and provides a basic outline of the discussion contained in the movie. The documentary couches the debate within the compelling stories of its central characters, resulting in an experience I can best describe as entertaining. Being already familiar with Wilson’s style and exceptional speaking ability, and having taken up the hobby of videography, I admit I was not so concerned with the argument itself as I was interested in seeing it conveyed through this new medium. Executive producers Aaron Rench and N.D. Wilson – both from Moscow – teamed up with Hollywood director Darren Doane to pull of a captivating (and impartial) approach to what would otherwise have been two heads talking from behind their respective podiums.
I recommend Collision as a new take on an old debate. The DVD was released on October twenty-seventh. Read more and watch trailers, outtakes, and interviews by clicking here.
A lot of people ask me what Norway is like. I tell them it is beautiful. It tell them it is secluded. I tell them it is my favorite place on earth. I tell them it is not Sweden. With respect to the economic crisis, I tell them Norway has hardly felt it. I also concede that it is expensive. The cost of living is high, but so is the quality of life, as confirmed by this article passed along by my father.
With my sister packing up for her imminent move to California, I caught the fever (perhaps not the best choice of words around here) and started going through some boxes of my own. I came across a copy of The Spokesman-Review that I picked up in the Spokane airport on our way to Chicago earlier this Summer. The issue, dated July 3, contained two articles that I had intended to pass along, and they are still just as interesting.
The first, which I could not find on the Spokesman’s website, was reporting on the same data as this story from the Idaho Statesman. They give some insightful speculations on why Idaho consistently ranks at or near the top of the list for new diagnoses of melanoma.
On a lighter note (no pun intended) came this short write-up about a marijuana arrest made in Central Washington. I am pretty sure I began laughing out loud on the plane when I came to the last line. You will have to scroll down to the story titled “Drug enforcers…”.
I am paging through Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003) and stumble upon his discussion of viruses:
“They also have an unnerving capacity to burst upon the world in some new and startling form and then to vanish again as quickly as they came…
“It is sometimes called the Great Swine Flu epidemic and sometimes the Great Spanish Flu epidemic, but in either case it was ferocious. The First World War killed 21 million people in four years; swine flu did the same in its first four months. Almost 80 per cent of American casualties in the First World War came not from enemy fire, but from flu…
“Swine flu arose as a normal, non-lethal flu in the spring of 1918, but somehow, over the following months – no-one knows how or where – it mutated into something more severe. A fifth of victims suffered only mild symptoms, but the rest became gravely ill and many died. Some succombed within hours; others held on for a few days.
“In the United States, the first deaths were recorded among sailors in Boston in late August 1918, but the epidemic quickly spread to all parts of the country. Schools closed, public entertainments were shut down, people everywhere wore masks. It did little good. Between autumn 1918 and spring the following year, 548,452 people died of the flu in America. The toll in Britain was 220,000, with similar numbers in France and Germany. No-one knows the global toll, as records in the third world were often poor, but it was not less than twenty million and probably more like fifty million. Some estimates have put the global total as high as a hundred million.
“In an attempt to devise a vaccine, medical authorities conducted experiments on volunteers at a military prison on Deer Island in Boston Harbor. The prisoners were promised pardons if they survived a battery of tests. These tests were rigorous to say the least. First, the subjects were injected with infected lung tissue taken from the dead and then sprayed in the eyes, nose and mouth with infectious aerosols. If they still failed to succumb, they had their throats swabbed with discharges taken straight from the sick and dying. If all else failed, they were required to sit open-mouthed while a gravely ill victim was sat up slightly and made to cough into their faces.
“Out of – somewhat amazingly – three hundred men who volunteered, the doctors chose sixty-two for the tests. None contracted the flu – not one. The only person who did grow ill was the ward doctor, who swiftly died. The probable explanation for this is that the epidemic had passed through the prison a few weeks earlier and the volunteers, all of whom had survived the visitation, had a natural immunity.
“Much about the 1918 flu epidemic is understood poorly or not at all. One mystery is how it erupted suddenly, all over, in places separated by oceans, mountain ranges and other earthly impediments. A virus can survive for no more than a few hours outside a host body, so how could it appear in Madrid, Bombay and Philadelphia all in the same week?
“The probable answer is that it was incubated and spread by people who had only slight symptoms or none at all. Even in normal outbreaks, about 10 per cent of people in any given population have the flu but are unaware of it because they experience no ill effects. And because they remain in circulation they tend to be the great spreaders of the disease.
“That would account for the 1918 outbreak’s widespread distribution, but it still doesn’t explain how it managed to lie low for several months before erupting so explosively at more or less the same time all over. Even more mysterious is that it was most devastating to people in the prime of life. Flu normally is hardest on infants and the elderly, but in the 1918 outbreak deaths were overwhelmingly among people in their twenties and thirties. Older people may have benefited from resistance gained from an earlier exposure to the same strain, but why the very young were similarly spared is unknown. The greatest mystery of all is why the 1918 flu was so ferociously deadly when most flus are not. We still have no idea.”
