The Future of Food
If you see one documentary this year, or in the next five, see this one, The Future of Food. We saw it yesterday and I was humbled and enlivened to see a problem illuminated along with a solution. The documentary has the tone of someone who sat through Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 and decided that it just was not as an effective way to get dialogue and movement around an issue as it could.
Deborah Koons Garcia, perhaps in response to Michael Moore's lackluster ability to highlight problems of our free-market economy and come off sounding hollow without following through on telling us really what we can do ( besides emailing our senators or protesting someone or something). The Future of Food does a fantastic job of illustrating the problem inherent in Genetically Modified Organisms as a basis for food, that their impacts on the environment haven't been researched enough, are supported and shoved down the world's throat by the one of the largest (monopolistic) agricultural conglomerates on the planet (Monsanto), the negative impacts on the farmer's key ability to harvest and reuse their own seed, and some steps we can and are already taking to reduce and hopefully reverse the impacts and potential impacts of GMOs on our lives and global food chain.
I've heard some critics content that the tone of the film was overly critical of GMOs and that they remain skeptical of such harsh criticism, yet I came away with no sketicism of the sort. I now understand that GMOs have good and bad impacts on harvest and food production and that the posited goods of GMOs are an exciting allure, but I am further cautioned towards being more selective about the foods I eat and will work towards cautioning others as well and spreading access to this cautionary tale. For if anything, we must continue to learn from history.
The Future of Food demonstrates that sometimes this history demands that someone shape the dialogue to affront your very sense of being in order for you to understand the sheer impact on your livelihood, and sometimes it takes a simple demonstration or act. This was Ms. Koons simple act, now it is our responsibility to further educate ourselves and one another. Sure, someday we may be ready for GMOs, but this film highlights the fact and reminds us that we have dashed into technological breakthroughs headlong before and ended up with our heads firmly planted in the sand. Let us not forget where the combustion engine takes us and is taking us, nor where the fires of atomic energy have taken us and who its taken away. Fear sometimes is the last resort in keeping we humans from taken that wrong step towards a perilous end. This movie strikes just enought fear into my own thoughts on food, to keep my fires burning a bit brighter.
The 20th Century brought great goods through industrialization and great perils. We've seen the demise of thousands of species and millions of humans at the hands of misused technological developments. In turn we've benefited from technological developments as never before. Today, I publish my own opinion a the blink of an eye and I can also find out as many facts and countervailing facts about as topic as my grandparents could come to understand in a lifetime. There is no denying that good comes from technological breakthroughs or the order and magnitude of GMOs, but there is also much evidence showing that in the wrong hands, and when laws become bent and abused to favor the few, the bad is more likely to surface than the good.
