i realized that it seems like i do nothing but wait around from trip to trip. this is not the case at all. my days are filled with what seems like a whole lot of nothingness but lasts 8 hours. this last unit was the 'food' unit as i may have mentioned. so basically we learned about organic farming. which, you know, is a kind of interesting topic in a very vague sort of way. do i want to eat chemicals? no, thanks for asking. should farmer's have major health problems because they used chemicals? ummm also no. beyond that i didnt really understand how we could have a whole unit on why organic is great. sure we touched on fair trade which is sorta kinda related to organics, and we met some really great organic farmers, but throughout the unit i couldn't help feeling that there were so many more important things to talk about if we were going to talk about food. i couldn't seem to convey to the more crunchy of the bunch that organics didn't matter if people couldn't get food at all. and i don't even mean in the 'there are starving kids in china, finish your carrots' kind of deal. i mean that in our own country there are an overwhelming number of people on welfare and food stamps and other support programs that can't even access nutritional food, let alone special, high priced organic foods. people in the group were all excited about going on the 100 Mile Diet (which is pretty much the opposite of organics these days because the organic market is so mass produced because it is such a fad right now that most organic products come from farther away and have been more processed and messed with than the regular foods so that a Wallmarter can feel like they are in on the trend) but what i was saying is that people were talking about these huge organic movements that they are going to start so that our little farming families in Surin will benefit without even thinking about anything that could perhaps be done to solve larger food issues. i was just extremely disenchanted with this unit which proclaimed itself to be about the problems with distribution of food, solving world hunger, and looking at how food affects us personally.
at the end of the unit we were supposed to write a paper essentially about how to start an organic movement. i was kinda pissed that i was forced to continue thinking about what i felt was a moot point and instead i wrote about how freely the term "poor person" is thrown around to distance the 'real' people from those who dont care enough to get themselves out of debt. i found out that 1.2 million more people are living below the poverty line in the suburbs than in the cities in america. poor people are all around! can you imagine! anyyyyyway yeah the director of the program did not think it was a worthy topic for a paper because it is not about thailand. surprisingly however, there are 'poor people' in thailand too! and they dont get treated like the regular people either! so when i get back i guess i wont know how to solve world hunger (because im sure if they would have tried they could have taught me how) but i could give you a step by step to become an organic farmer.
thanks for sitting through the rant. buy organic, buy fair trade, but be nice to 'poor people.'
love ya
at the end of the unit we were supposed to write a paper essentially about how to start an organic movement. i was kinda pissed that i was forced to continue thinking about what i felt was a moot point and instead i wrote about how freely the term "poor person" is thrown around to distance the 'real' people from those who dont care enough to get themselves out of debt. i found out that 1.2 million more people are living below the poverty line in the suburbs than in the cities in america. poor people are all around! can you imagine! anyyyyyway yeah the director of the program did not think it was a worthy topic for a paper because it is not about thailand. surprisingly however, there are 'poor people' in thailand too! and they dont get treated like the regular people either! so when i get back i guess i wont know how to solve world hunger (because im sure if they would have tried they could have taught me how) but i could give you a step by step to become an organic farmer.
thanks for sitting through the rant. buy organic, buy fair trade, but be nice to 'poor people.'
love ya
3 comments:
i love you steph.
Excellent points, Steph. How interesting that they've taken you to Thailand and taught you about a movement which is almost exclusive to the middle-to-upper-class in America.
What is the experience like for farmers in Thailand? My guess would be that Thailand is following closely on China's heels in coming up with new and exciting ways of fouling the earth and poisoning its people. Do they have a problem with pesticides there, or do they still use more natural methods?
It would be curious to compare the health of a country that largely doesn't use pesticide to the health of one that does -- I sometimes suspect that most of us here would be healthier if we ate more parasites but had fewer chemicals on our food. But then, I haven't really studied the issue.
Oh, by the way, you have a new cousin, and he's already on the Internet: http://zanebrendan.blogspot.com
yeah they eat organic here too in a way, but it is not the same thing as in america in that it is not really popular or making any kind of a statement or anything.
as for the farmers, yeah most of them use lots and lots of chemicals since thailand jumped on the green revolution bandwagon and had to produce more on the same amount of land. the places we visited were mostly organic communities. the farmers mostly said they did it because the fertilizers and pesticides were hurting their health, but it also turns out to be more profitable. since they are not buying the GMO seeds that require all the chemicals and need to be purchased every season, they don't have to invest as much in their crops. so though they have less to sell in the end it costed them considerably less to grow it so they avoid some debt.
i dunno how the health of the general public is right now, though we were talking about how most of the 70something year old grandmas looked younger and were more spry than 50 year olds in 'merica.
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