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Health & Fitness

Plow to Plate Presents: What's for Dinner?

What’s for Dinner? Is a short film, it runs just under half an hour, but it is comprehensive. Set in China, What’s for Dinner? examines the effects of the industrialization of pig farming on public health and the environment, not just on China, but on the world.

China’s issues with industrialized farming mirror those of the United States.  For example, “intensive agriculture” (akin to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations – CAFOs) is driving small farmers out of business. Many families used to raise about four pigs per year, now few families do. The overhead is too high. Instead, a single producer will house around 3,000 pigs in six houses.

These Intensive breeding operations parallel those in the U.S. – animals forced into small spaces, fed chemicals, and injected with medicines and hormones to speed their growth. A woman interviewed says she never buys or eats pigs’ ears because that’s where they receive their shots. Another says these practices are humans harming other humans.

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And humans are being harmed, in more ways than one. In the past 20 years, increased meat consumption has led to a dramatic rise in “Western” illnesses: heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, hypertension, etc. The environment has also been damaged. Once clean rivers that ran through villages, towns, and cities are now clogged with sewage, drugs, pesticide and garbage. Waterways that teemed with fish and wildlife, where people used to bath and wash their clothes, have become toxic, smelly nuisances that no one cares for. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are on the rise, contributing to global climate change.

These changes have come on rapidly. Only a generation ago most people ate a mainly vegetarian diet. Meat was scarce and primarily a side dish, not the main course, and most pigs were exported to Hong Kong. As Chinese became wealthier, their meat consumption increased dramatically. Today Chinese feed 36% of their crops to animals. This exceeds what used to go to people and China faces potential food shortages.

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Attitudes towards meat have changed too. Today it is a sign of prosperity, of being part of the middle class, to eat meat every day or to dine at a fast food restaurant such as Donald Macky, a McDonald’s rip off. Fast food restaurants, like KFC, which began to proliferate in the 1990s, are symbols of good health and bodily strength, the future, progress, destinations, mostly for the young. Today it would be rude to serve a guest a vegetarian meal.

Yet just as there is a nascent alternative food movement in the United States, so too does China have its dissenters. In Beijing you can find the owner of the restaurant Vegan Hut, who confesses that his friends think he is crazy, the vegan musician who says that animals are his friends and he has no desire to eat them, and public health officials dismayed at the alarming increase in illness.

These mavericks acknowledge that Chinese do not want to go back to their old life styles. China benefits from economic growth and a better standard of living. However, they argue that the current path is not sustainable and are calling for their countrymen to buy and eat less meat. In a country where vegetables are cheap, plentiful, and varied and have been consumed for centuries, this should not be too tall an order. As the friend of the animals observed, eating meat is more a desire of the mind than the body.

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Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

Park Slope Food Coop – 2nd Floor

7:00 p.m.  Free and open to the public.  Refreshments will be served.

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