We’ve been able to hear Mike Bell lectures in two different places; our FIG lecture and also Agroecology. Within those, he has mentioned the same concept which is his idea that our food has a soul to it. It sounds pretty crazy to think about if you take it at face value, but if you really read into it he makes an interesting point about being more thoughtful about your food.
Mike Bell is trying to say that your food has a story to it, that it doesn’t just appear prepared on your plate. Most likely it’s a processed food in some form, where something happened to it to be able to be eaten and to be on your plate. The point that I think he’s (trying) to make is that it’s very important to understand what that journey was, as its story can have consequences you might not want to be supporting by eating it.
This connects our FIG lecture, as it uses the food we’re preparing and becoming a part of our food’s journey, and Agroecology, as in that class we learn about the way food comes from the farm to the table, and that particular journey. In Agroecology, we’ve learned a large amount about what farming and using the Earth to produce food for us can do, and the effects of it. At the beginning of the course, we learned about soil health and how important that can be to have a healthy Earth with a strong example of the Dust Bowl. Because we were so focused on using every square inch of land to farm off of, we neglected the consequence of uprooting our soil and creating dust clouds that lasted for miles and miles.
It’s things like that which create the stories about our food that really matters. The good stories are good to hear and heartwarming, but the bad stories cause negative consequences that affect us in the real world. By learning these bead stories, Mike Bell is saying that we will become conscious consumers, and from that, we will be able to better help both ourselves and our environment as well.
To relate it to more people, a lot of people choose to become vegan for reasons that don’t involve a dislike to the taste of meat, but rather for how that meat gets on their plate. We learned about Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s) in Agroecology and those are a strong reason why people choose to not eat meat. These animals are subjected to torturous conditions with the end goal of being slaughtered by a butcher, something many people find appalling.
Another reason why people commonly choose to change their diet to veganism is that of the conditions of the human workers, which has been outlined to us through our Anthropology class. Commonly, people work terrible hours to make terrible pay to produce the food we eat or work in terrible conditions. With the knowledge that this happens semi-frequently to produce our food, people choose not to eat that food because by eating it they are supporting the way it got to their table. Mike Bell is trying to educate us to learn the stories of our food, otherwise, we would happily eat what we might not understand.
Lars Dreams of Food 