On being Vegetarians...

So last night Matt and I sat down to watch a movie. Unfortunately Inglorious Basterds had a slight crack in the disc which meant a change in plans. Rather than watch a strange and bloody film about Nazis we decided to go for a strange and informative (and still kind of bloody I'd like to say) film about food in the US.

Let me tell you, I have never been so happy to be a vegetarian. (yes, in case you didn't know, we are both living the full on veggie lifestyle and loving it...in fact after what I saw last night, I might even raise my children to be veggies...but that's a long way off so it doesn't matter now).

This documentary took us on a little journey to learn about our food systems here in the US. If you haven't seen it, you should. It demonstrates the ways that our food system is seriously messed up by revealing that only a handful of corporations actually run the system (despite what you may think b/c of the plethora of products and companies represented on grocery store shelves) and those corporations tend to put profit over people (and most definitely over animals for that matter). We learned that corn has taken over the food world (hello...cows are supposed to eat grass, not corn) as almost every product uses some altered version of corn. That is crazy. We also learned that chickens can't take but a couple of steps because the weight of their breasts (which we have altered to make bigger) cannot be sustained by their regularly paced bone growth. Ok one last thing, we learned that beef is often cleansed with AMMONIA. Now that is gross.

Alright...that's enough for my movie (and healthy food!) plug. I know that we aren't immune to bad food production just because we don't eat meat but I feel a lot better knowing that I am not contributing to those large corporations with some nasty practices. We deserve better...and now I'm off to research some local CSAs(Community Supported Agriculture) for us to join this spring/summer.