My Relationship with Food

I feel like I have always had a pretty good relationship with food. I am relatively open-minded with what I eat; I'm willing to at least try anything once. It wasn't until I took my freshman English class that I realized maybe my relationship with food wasn't as good as I had thought. Before I came to college I probably ate fast food at least three or four times a week. I always knew it wasn't necessarily the healthiest option, it's impossible to escape the reality that fast food is becoming less and less healthy as time goes by. What I wasn't aware of was the way in which the animals are treated to produce large amounts of meat for next to nothing.

Watching the movie Food Inc. really opened my eyes to big business food production. It sounds naive of me, but I never knew about factory-style farms and how they produce extreme amounts of meat quickly and cheaply. Whenever I used to go to the grocery store with my mom, I always thought "corn-fed beef" was a good thing. Little did I know, cows don't naturally digest corn and the beef from corn-fed cows is actually less healthy than traditional grass and hay-fed cows. For a period of time the factory cows were being fed meal that included ground up bits of other cows, causing the cows to be almost like cannibals. This helped lead to outbreaks of Mad Cow disease. Almost worse than the treatment of the cows is the treatment of the chickens on these factory style farms. It's appalling the way the chickens are crowded into small buildings, fed by a chemical spray and get very little to no natural sunlight in their whole lives.

Although I could never become a vegetarian or a vegan, I like meat entirely too much, I do try to do what I can not to support these inhumane practices. I think it is ethically wrong to treat these animals in this manner. Most other cultures realize that without these animals, we wouldn't be able to survive so they treat the animals that are to become their food with a great deal of respect. It may not be the most economical way to raise animals that will become food, but it is much more ethical.

Another thing I have learned about is that there are many food myths. One of the myths that I found most interesting was brought to my attention when Warren Taylor came in to speak to our class. He founded Snowville Creamery, which is a completely sustainable dairy farm. These days everyone is concerned with consuming too much fat in their diets, and though there are some fats one should stay away from, saturated fats are actually healthy for you. I believe the statistic Taylor stated was that women who drank an 8 ounce glass of non-homogenized whole each day were 60% less likely to contract breast cancer due to a special acid that is not present in homogenized milk from corn-fed cows. We even got to taste the milk! I'm usually a skim milk drinker, so I was a little hesitant to go from a fat free milk to a full fat milk. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the Snowville whole milk much more than my usual milk choice. Something funny I noticed was that usually when I have a glass of milk I try to drink it as soon as it is poured because I don't like the flavor as much when it's not ice cold, but my Snowville milk sat out for almost half an hour and the flavor was still uncompromised.

One of the largest ways in which my relationship has changed with food is through the food labels. I will no longer be focusing on the labels to see if what I'm eating contains saturated fats. Saturated fats are from animals and occur naturally so I don't feel the need to stray from them any longer. Also, when I live on my own one day and must shop for myself at the supermarket, I will try as hard as I can to stay away from corn-fed beef. Food Inc. brought up an issue about a young boy who ate a burger made with beef that was infected with Mad Cow Disease and was dead within a matter of days. These types of problems are much more rare in cows that are raised on a more traditional farm and fed the correct types of food.

I think my relationship is constantly changing, and will continue to change throughout the rest of my life, but I will definitely try to pay more attention to the types of food I put into my body.