indesertum
Stylish Dinosaur
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2007
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TIP: to embed Youtube clips, put only the encoded part of the Youtube URL, e.g. eBGIQ7ZuuiU between the tags. and it got me thinking about food again. the most education i've got on this issue is what i've read from omnivore's dilemma, watching future of food on hulu and food, inc on netflix, and reading the lobster article that was posted which i can't find. i live off of a wegmans nearby and I for some reason had trusted that the animals and farmers were treated ok. i've been finding out more and more that the wegmans brand stuff isnt that much different from any other store. in all the premade food they sell there's a lot of stuff in there. for example my friend left ithaca and left me some prepackaged chicken breasts marinaded in a lemon garlic sauce from wegmans. there's so much stuff in here. like i dont understand why you need thickeners like xantham gum or food coloring or soybean oil in a simple marinade. I strongly disagree that industrialization or food chemicals and additives are unhealthy as there's little proof that they are. However the addition of such products simply means to me that the product is of lower quality. you can just simply google wegmans animal cruelty or the like and find stuff like http://www.wegmanscruelty.com/ however i do think maybe the advantage of wegmans is that while they sell the usual ****** store stuff, they also have great quality produce like grass fed beef, free range chickens, etc. there's even a section for jamon iberico, wagyu bone in ribeye steaks, dry aged prime ribeye steaks, wild caught salmon etc also i personally feel that you can eat farmed seafood without guilt over animal suffering as lobsters and fish and the like simply do not have the cerebral cortex to process computations about pain. in other words they have no metaphysical understanding of pain (ie when they feel pain they dont think "hey this is painful"). if you put a lobster in boiling water it tries to get out because its opoid receptors are telling its brain that its' body is getting destroyed which results in behavior that tries to escape it, but it doesnt suffer because it cant understand pain. whether or not farmed seafood is environmentally conscious is a different matter anyways this is all a moot point for me as the fact is that I simply can't afford the higher quality and more humane produce whether at wegmans or the farmer's market. I need protein to live and being a student to get the amount of food I need on the budget I have I simply can't afford to pay 10 dollars for 2 free range chicken breasts. for the same amount i could get 8 breasts of chickens that had their beaks cut off, grown in cramped spaces, clubbed to death, etc. the most i can do is buy locally grown eggs from free range chickens. i've participated in a CSA before, but unfortunately it only happens in the summer and it's still pretty expensive. also on the issue of organic branding. organic really has nothing to do with humane treatment or environmentally conscious. it just specifies what fertilizers a farmer can use. so i personally think it's a huge scam and purposefully avoid things that say organic. i also feel that they are not of any appreciable higher quality. what do you guys do? do you just buy whatever and not think about it? if you can afford it what kind of produce do you buy? do you produce without thinking where it came from? if you're conscious about it do you buy simply anything that's labelled organic or do you actually go to a farmer's market and buy from a trusted vendor where you've seen how they produce their produce? if you know a lot more about the issue could you please point me to documentaries that you trust or some books that you appreciated?