Presentation on Locally Available Food
I really enjoyed the presentation on locally available food that our class visited last Wednesday. I’ve seen a few minutes of Food, Inc. and I had heard about the huge corporations that own patents on nearly every type of hybrid seed used today. It’s a scary idea to think how our food industry has become so vastly commercialized; it can be such a daunting concept that you might think there’s nothing to be done to make our food local again.
This isn’t true. It is possible to buy groceries at a farmers market or through a CSA, like the one run by John and Diane Riehm in northwest Ohio. After reading a newspaper article last summer in the Toledo City Paper and after viewing Wednesday’s presentation, I’m pretty sure that I would like to participate in a CSA program after graduating college and settling down. There are many benefits, such as knowing your farmer firsthand while supporting a local business, along with the added nutrients that come from eating foods with fewer pesticides and that are vine ripened.
Some issues were brought up in the presentation that I’m considering studying for our research paper we’ll be writing later in this course. I’d like to study Cuba’s agricultural practices, as it was mentioned that they may have a system that is entirely organic, which I find really interesting. I’d also like to do further study on the corporations in the US and in general that have so much control over the food industry and the government. I’d also consider doing research on CSA’s in general, and possibly on Issue 2, which was recently passed in the state of Ohio (and I basically know nothing about it, other than that it is controversial). Overall, I learned a lot from the presentation and I have quite a few ideas on topics that I can study for my future research paper, which is great!