Here are a few of our favorite Big Ideas + Other Cool Stuff from Week 2 of John & Ocean Robbins' 4-week course Living the Food Revolution.
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The Context
Find out the truth about genetically modified foods, and the real effect of the food you eat on your health and on our world. Then learn how to put that knowledge into actionable and delicious practice in your life.
Best selling author, John Robbins, joins forces with his son, Ocean Robbins, to give you practical, step-by-step support to bring your food choices into alignment with what you truly value.
Living the Food Revolution will extend your life, increase your vitality, and help you take a stand for a more compassionate and sustainable world.
Here are a few of our favorite Big Ideas from Week 2 - Our Food, Our World:
Big Idea #1: Our Animal Family
Think about the first animal you loved: did it have a name? how did it leave your life? How was that for you? How does that memory live in you now?
We call some animals pets and value them so highly—we pay their vet bills and we let them sleep in the same beds we do; other animals, we call livestock, and because of that semantic difference, we allow ourselves to end their life for consumption.
Animals draw breath from the same source as we do. They are our brothers and sisters.
Why does this difference exist? Does it align with your beliefs?
As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Never, never be afraid to do what's right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society's punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.”
Do you need to take a stand for your own integrity and conscience?
Big Idea #2: Save the Animals, Save the Planet
The science is there: global warming exists. Our actions are causing changes to this planet and they are happening now!
Every single glacier on this planet is shrinking; all the glaciers in Glacier National Park in Montana will be gone in 20 years. The Earth will be the hottest it has been in 2 million years at the end of this century.
The most significant way to change this: eat less or no meat, especially factory-farmed. This is the strongest reason to eat a more plant-strong diet. We can begin to slow this change down!
What about Grass Fed vs. Regular Beef?
It’s like trading in your car and getting a Prius. It helps, but there is more to be done. We need to eat much less of all forms of beef. We really need to take global warming far more seriously than we have.
The biggest thing we can do to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions: eating more vegetables!
Big Idea #3: Feeding the World: GMOs vs. Organic Food
What are GMO’s?
Genetically modified organisms. Sounds tasty, right? :)
Some of the hoopla surrounding GMOs happened when Time magazine ran an article stating that GMO’s could solve world hunger. Well, none of the biotech companies are doing anything about this. None of the genetically modified crops have any desirable characteristics. Most of the GMO crops are created to feed animals.
Currently, GMO's have nothing to do with solving world hunger, and everything to do with making more profit and controlling the world’s food supply.
If we were to shift to more organic, low-input, sustainable forms of agriculture, and were able to drastically reduce our meat (specifically beef) consumption, we could feed the world organically, because we wouldn’t need to produce as much.
We need to produce the amounts of grain that we do because we're feeding almost all of it to the animals we confine in farms!
Get this: It takes 16 pounds of grains to produce the average pound of beef; it only takes only one pound of grain to make a pound of whole wheat bread, brown rice or quinoa.
This is a terribly inefficient way to feed ourselves. We’re cycling the grain through our animals, and essentially wasting most of it. It’s a protein factory in reverse. This is insane.
If we were to adopt a more plant-based and humane diet, and didn't need to produce so much grain to feed our livestock in factory farms, we could all eat organically and do quite well!
Other Cool Stuff:
If you want to take action on animal issues:
PETA: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
If you want to take action on global warming issues:
Check out the work of 350.org!
For GMO issues:
We think you'll dig the work of the Institute for Responsible Technology and LabelGMOs.org!
If you want to take action on school lunch issues, check out Healthy School Lunches!
For mail-order GMO-free foods anywhere in the United States, check out
Green Polka Dot Box!
For more information about soy (which was raised in our first class), and many other good resources, check out John Robbins’ new book:
No Happy Cows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Food Revolution.
And here's an article about soy on the johnrobbins.info site!
Homework:
These are the exercises we put forth on today’s call, as suggested homework. This is not required, but it is encouraged if you want to get the most out of the course.
- Go to the store and read labels to find out how many products you can identify that contain GMOs over the course of a shopping trip. (Remember, that means looking for non-organic corn, soy, canola oil, and “vegetable oil”.)
- In the next week, find one new healthy recipe you love that could become part of your regular diet.
- Go to Local Harvest and find the closest three farmer’s markets to you. If there’s one nearby that you haven’t visited – check it out!
Knowledge is power!
Want to connect with other inspiring and cool peeps? Head over to the en*theos community!
Hope you enjoyed and we'll see you in Week 3 - Any Way You Slice It, It's Still Bologna!
-The en*theos Team
