For my Food Management Theory course, we’ve been assigned several videos to watch online and write brief commentaries to bring to the first day of class.

I found this particular talk by Mark Bittman (love him) on the over-production and over-consumption of meat and junk food and its impact on our health and the environment especially thought-provoking.

What I like is that he implores the audience to cut back on meat rather than going full-blown vegetarian. He also calls the issue one of “global survival” rather than bringing morals into it. That’s a kool-aid I can drink.

Of animals, he says, “The time has come to stop raising them industrially and to stop eating them thoughtlessly” and that “there’s no way to treat animals well when you’re killing ten billion of them a year.”

No sh*t.

I was also very interested by his comments on the USDA and the food pyramid and the fact that many of its developers had/have ties to agrobusiness. In short: there’s a reason we’re not explicitly encouraged to eat a diet rich in plants and low in animal products and junk food…