Thanksgiving Ethos

For my conversation, I decided to choose a topic that was very relevant to the whole ethos of Thanksgiving and the holiday season at large: industrial agriculture & food systems. In this conversation, I chose one of my close friends to discuss this with, as I had gone to a series of different “Friendsgivings” but not a family one this year due to medical circumstances within my immediate family. This friend of mine is from near where my parents live and has taken some college classes but is not currently pursuing a 2 or 4-year degree. At this Friendsgiving, we had cooked a variety of different foods, one of which was a Butterball turkey, arguably one of the most notable and worst factory farming offenders. I decided to bring this up, and this …show more content…
They said that, as the population of the world is growing exponentially, only factory and industrial agriculture will be able to support the world’s increasing population, especially if it reaches 9 or 10 billion as it is expected to do by 2050. As a response to this, I began to elaborate a bit on how industrial agriculture is a pretty new way of producing food and that agro-ecology and other, more organic methods have been proven effective and more than capable of producing enough food for a growing population in the future. I talked about some of the food misconceptions presented in Lappé’s World Hunger: 10 Myths, the first and third being already covered above. I tried to explain to him that it is a major misunderstanding that only the free market and its large-scale agricultural models can “save us all”. Clearly that has not been the case nor will it be in the future that capitalism steps in to save the world: that goes directly against its aims. The world produces enough food today to feed all of its human inhabitants. The problem here is with the distribution and economic systems responsible for delivering and receiving payment for this food that is the problem. Many farmers are better off not growing their crops due to perverse or inadequate financial incentives under present systems, so a systematic change is almost more important than the increase of …show more content…
I think that we, especially at the University of Michigan, tend to isolate ourselves in our bubble of the student body and Ann Arbor, not wanting to deal with the truths in the outside world that we instead ignore. I think it is, therefore, more important than ever to engage the general population concerning the environment, trying to dispel any major misconceptions on the way. With the recent election and the election of a president who is more opposed to the EPA, environmentalism, and the idea of climate change as fact, than any other in recent history, it is unsettling and dangerous to the continuation of the world. Trump sees environmental protection as the direct opponent of economic progress, and millions of Americans mistakenly agree with him. He doubts climate change and is appointing billionaires who agree with this, going as far to threaten removing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement. Now more than ever before are not only the fundamentals of environmentalism threatened but also the social, economic, and cultural progress we have made over the past fifty or so years. Now is not the time to sit idly by but to be active in one’s own community and state, where resistance to anti-environmentalism is most likely to have the greatest effect. I see this discussion and this assignment as something much greater than I think even Ivette imagined, as it was