Xavier's Digital Portfolio
Humanities
Is Eating An Agricultural Act?
Throughout the food ethics project, I have come across many things that have kind of affected my perspective on how I see food being manufactured/made. To start off, it showed me how much of our foods come from a single plant, that plant being corn. I didn't know that it was used for so many things like for animal food, various kinds of foods that we make, fuel (ethanol). When I started to learn more about how the livestock are treated in the factory farms, it gave me a different outlook on how I see the meat I eat.
The deeper I looked into various ways large corporation farms operated I noticed that most if not all animals lived in poor conditions and had small lifespans depending on how much they could squeeze out of the cows.
Throughout the time of this project, it's made a larger impact on my life.
While studying this project, we were doing the more "sciency" part of this. In chemistry, we learned about how the chemical structure of foods reacted with our bodies and how it affects us. Not only that but we studied how much energy is used to digest the food that we eat. Knowing all of the science that goes into what we're learning about food really changed how I see processed foods and the kind of food I like to eat. Studying food in both my humanities and chemistry class gave me a new outlook on food in general. It's made me rethink a lot of choices about food that I plan on doing differently in the future.
My main takeaways from learning about food academically would be; learning more about my local food markets to see what would be a suitable replacement for something I'd find in a supermarket, learning about how I could help the local community and trying to find more ethical and environmentally better food sources. Taking a deep dive into the food that we eat on a daily basis, like with how the food comes from the farm all the way to my plate. It's opened my eyes to how unethical some ways that food is being produced.