Final Essay

Entering this history class, I have learned a lot that I never expected to learn. I do not see this course of “Life Doesn’t Have to be Meaningless” as like a regular history class that I used to have in SOF looking at textbooks and learn what people back then are doing. It is an inside out class that will really make you be aware and relate yourself to the outside world instead of trying to connect yourself back to the history. I never thought life is meaningless overall at this point of my life, but as kept learning in class, it helped me to look at my life in many different angles which caused me to think life is even more meaningful. Earlier in the class, I said “People are all liars that they are lying to themselves that they are living a good and meaningful life when they are actually escaping the real world and living in their own hallucinatory world.” I think this arguement is too extreme, because not everybody is escaping from reality. I have found that my perspective of looking at how to live a good and meaningful life is still evolving as i learn on. Throughout the course, we looked at life through dominant corporate culture and folk culture by doing interviews of people on street, our parents, looking at films, magazines, music video…etc and related back to our life. Then we focus on holidays that most Americans celebrated and figuring out what is really behind these holidays that affected our life. After that, we look at our life through units of elders, animals, health, food, and collapse. In the beginning of the year, I thought that from learning in this class, my perspective of looking at my own life will change and I will value different things in my life that is consider meaningful. But now, I realized that my aspects of a meaningful life has not change that much as I thought it would be, because I will make a similar video as the one I made in the beginning of the year if I were asked to make a new one.

From the dominant corporate and folk culture, what both value the most is happiness. I still believe that everybody survive in this world are consuming happiness. Looking at life in the dominant corporate culture’s perspective, it enhances the idea of center attention and vanity of human beings. Such as the advertisement, movies, or music videos, it sends out the message of to be superiors and dress/look the best in crowds. Up to this point of my life, I do not think I value these aspects in my life because I never see being the center of attention as one of the meaningful aspects. However, the marginal messages from the dominant corporate culture are the ones that I sort of follow sometimes. Such as be successful, and make a different. I find this as part of my meaningful life because I believe that people should keep making changes and improve in their lives by overcoming obstacles. Learning mistakes I made in my life experiences will help me approach to success by keep making things better. Not all the dominant corporate messages are unreliable, and sometimes there do have ones that are worth to listen as an advice. Simultaneously, being raised up in a folk culture has shaped who I am right now. Before being exposed to many different kinds of things from media, my parents and teachers are the ones who taught me moral, and what human should value in life. I do not find everything my parents or teachers said is worth to listen, but there do have something that I learned from the folk culture. Living a good and meaningful life, we should value our family and friends because they are important in our lives. They are the ones who shaped our identities and lives. Especially when we need support from others, they are the ones who will be by our side. My perspective of looking at dominant corporate and folk culture has not change from the beginning to the end of the year. I still value the same aspects of my life such as overcoming difficulties, approaching to success, family, friends, and happiness.

Moving on learning about different holidays in the United States, it also has not changed the way I look at my own life. Instead, I am being exposed to things that I never being aware of about these holidays such as the Christmas or Thanksgiving. Many of the holidays in the United States has to do with spending time with family and saying nice things to each other as an appreciation. Additionally, there are also things that are prohibited. While spending time with family, you are not allowed to share things that are sad because it will ruin the mood of a holiday. You are also not allowed to bring up how whites have killed the Indians during Thanksgiving. Many of these prohibited messages were not being exposed through media or the folk culture. However, in this class, I am able to see what is going on in different kinds of holidays and how does that affect our lives. Though no major changes in my life, it did caused me to start being aware and not just looking at things that’s on the surface.

Learning about elders is also an interesting unit but did not really change my way of looking at lives. By reading my earlier post about reactions towards old people, I said, “I don't feel we have a distance between each other and I always talk to them as friends. Like my grandpa, although he is slow on computers, I chat with my grandpa through webcam on the internet. Even though it is hard to talk with the old people since they are elders and we should respect them, we still ask them about their health and life.” My reactions towards old people did not change and so far none of the old people in my family are being sent to the senior center. I do appreciate their earlier contributions to the next generation for us to live and have a better life. Perhaps I do not talk to them as often as to my parents or friends, but I think I do values elders in my life. I don’t find annoy by listening to them and I appreciate their advice from their own life experience. It is possible that their advice might not always help, but I guess old people remind us their mistakes are to avoid us making the same mistakes as they do. Therefore, I do not mind when old people are sharing their life experiences with me. One question we asked a lot during this unit is that what is the point for old people to still be alive? My answer to this question would be that because they value their family, and they do want to see their next generations to be living happily. Old people do values things in their life that they find it meaningful, and like Morrie, he has lived his life all the way with suffer in his last days. People gets old does not mean there is no meaning for them to live. As for me, I think old people are important in my life, because they are the ones who has contribute to the society in order to make us live right now.

Finally, the animal unit is one of the topics that did change my perspective of living a good and meaningful life. Before learning about “animals”, I have no idea how this topic will connect to life. But when I start learning about this unit, it changes the way I look at myself. I have accepted that I am actually just an animal like the others. I am not anybody different from them and therefore I should not expect someone will look after me because I am special. Because of the Genesis I, evolution, spending 95% of the time only with the same animals(human), humanizing pets, believe in souls and spirits, we has come to believe that we are superiors and we are special. We think we deserve to take over the other animals and we think that they do not think, therefore, they are like objects while we have feelings. In this unit, I learned that by accepting myself as an animal, I will not be thinking that I am more important than the others. I think this concept is extremely important for me as living a good and meaningful life because it really change my life as seeing every living thing as animals.

When we are learning about health, although physical, social, spiritual, and mental healthy also interacts with us a lot in our lives and all of them are related, I think emotional and moral health are the ones that we have to deal with the most and seems most resonant. People have emotions and we all have feelings towards our surroundings every moment. By learning about the existential therapy, it really has change my way of looking at my own life. At first, I always think making decisions are difficult and hard to make because it will ruin my life. But now, from studying the therapy, it actually makes me feel more comfortable of making choices. I know that as long as I am willing to take full responsibilities of the consequences for making that decisions, making any choices is not that complicated. In addition, it also demonstrates the idea of why people exist in this world. When people are feeling depress and having the desire to suicide, I think this therapy really can test what is the point of living. If the person refuses to commit suicide, it reveals the truth that he/she still wants to live for a reason. So that person will move on their life by following that reason as a goal of living. Moral health is also interesting because we often face many dilemmas in our life deciding what is right or wrong. By dividing moral health into different levels, even though is hard to choose, it categorize the choice into a category of explanation. Learning both moral and emotional health, it did not only deepen my knowledge of health, it also affects my way of living. It builds up more confident for me to make decisions in terms of right or wrong, and direct me to stay in positive emotions for most of the time.

The food unit is another topic that really did changes my life because I never pay attention to what I eat. Not only being exposed to animal cruelty, I also learned to pay close attention to what I am eating with appreciation. I often just eat the food as taking things for granted, and my attitude towards the food is just something that will keep me alive. But when I learn how to focus on my own diet and learning about industrial food at the same time, I start to be aware of what I am putting into my mouth. In addition, making our own food is definitely more delicious than buying food from outside. Simply is because we make it with my own hands so we appreciated more. Reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma has taught me the connection of food. I never know that most of the food is actually from corn. Also, I realized that we do rely on a lot of the advertisement and advice from the scientist or doctor to decide what to eat. As Pollan’s argument about food was that that we do not have a food culture in our society like those French or Italians, and we are so anxious about what to eat. I never thought of people will worry about what they should eat instead of just eating it to feed themselves. More incredible was that people do not know where the food they eat came from. By learning this food unit, did not really change what I eat but makes me being more aware of what I am eating. More important, I appreciate what I am eating more.

Follow by the previous food unit that all the food is industrial produced by oil/fossil fuel. Our society depends on oil to make everything work including economic. As I learned from the articles, oils will not just run out, but it required more energy to get it. Energy is something that money cannot buy and it just starts to decline when half of the oil is being used which called “Peak Oil”. A lot of the people predicted the collapse will come but nobody really know when. What happened in Easter Island has been a metaphor of how it will be to us. Although it might not be a perfect metaphor, but at least I am pretty sure it will collapse because of the reasonable predictions I read from one of the article. Whether to question the collapse is inevitable or avoidable, I think what is more important is to be aware of this issue. If is to go back to the major question, what is a meaningful life. I think collapse is definitely one of the meaningful movements because we experience something new. A lot of us do not really suffer pain compared to our ancestors and I think collapse will be one of the things that we might possibly have to get through. As we are living very safe without any panic, I think collapse will change our way of looking at meaningful life and what we really values. Thus, is better to know and be aware of what is going on around us instead of not knowing anything around the place that we are living in.

Overall in the course “Life doesn’t have to be Meaningless, my perspective of how to live a good and meaningful life has not really change. I still see that everything has a meaning to it when you give it to it. But it did keep me thinking about all different kinds of aspects in life. I no longer see things on the surface, but trying to look at them in more perspective. Although my perspective of living a good and meaningful life has not that many difference, but I start to be more aware of all the topics that we went over. In my first post for this class, I said, "To be meaningful is to learn or know something that I never know, so it will stays in my heart. The things that I will remember even though it has past for years, that is meaningful." What I stated earlier is how I still think about how to live a good and meaningful life. This is not like little kids losing their innocence for being exposed to the adulthood. But it is to show how myself has grown in a year, 5 years...etc. What I find it very meaningful in this class is that I am being exposed to new things every single day, like opening boxes of gifts with surprise. Knowing these things I mentioned above, it is not just something for a class. But it is something that actually affect my way of looking at life and something that I will take with me in life. My understanding of these aspects of life will keep evolving, and it will stay in my heart throughout my whole life.

Short and Smart

“Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon.” How all of us will look like when there is no civilization because our society is collapsing? As moving on to an industrial society, oil has become one of our commodities. The phones, shirts, furniture, transportations, vehicles, food…etc, almost everything we used now a day requires oil or fossil fuel to produce. From the “Community Solutions” websites, it has divided into three categories such as food, housing, transportations. These are the ones that we based on in our everyday life. Growing and shipping the food, using energy for the purpose of efficiency, and transportation using cars. All these things has already became part of our lives, is it ever possible not to rely on oil?
In the first collapse assignment about how Easter Island has collapsed from overused their main resources. Will United States resembles a similar result? The Polynesians in Easter Island values beautiful stone statues and their God in their culture. However, they were having competitions over beautiful and tall statues just to show off their distance to god. Eventually, it caused them to cut down more timbers than they needed. The timbers are like the oil to us, it is one of their commodities. They need timbers to make canoes, rope, houses…etc. to make a living. Supposedly, the Easter Islanders were living in a very fragile environment that the possibility of having deforestation is high. But based on what Jared Diamond has said, “Easter Islanders did succeed in getting enough water for drinking, cooking, and growing crops, but it took effort.” If the Polynesians knew their clans would be collapsed, will they still cutting down their last tree just to get closer to the God and look cool? The answer is predictable, because that is what humans do. We think that perhaps somewhere else farther might have few more trees left. Or we think that God will look after us, someone else will solve the problem for us. It is extremely difficult to make someone to disbelief what they are being raised to belief. As for people, we never learn lessons unless we make mistakes. Although America has a different situations compare to the Easter Island, but it is a metaphor of how we might possibly look like, “a society that destroyed itself by over exploiting its own resources.”
Reading the articles of “Peak Oil Primer” about peak oil, the feasibility of collapse in our society is very possible. “Peak oil is the simplest label for the problem of energy resource depletion, or more specifically, the peak in global oil production…Once we have used up about half of the original reserves, oil production becomes ever more likely stop growing and begin a terminal decline, hence 'peak'. The peak in oil production does not signify 'running out of oil', but it does mean the end of cheap oil, as we switch from a buyers' to a sellers' market.” As the Easter Islanders, every culture has their own commodities that they rely on. What our industrial country relies on is oil. From the earlier unit about industrial food, most of the food that Americans eat is made from fossil fuel. From the quote, peak in oil does not mean oil is running out, it means the end of cheap oil. This might be the main problem that causes our society to collapse financially. Based on the annoying visuals from “Limits to Growth”, it said that “Capitalism needs more-and-more natural resources for more-and-more economic growth. In order to supply more-and-more natural resources for economic growth, more-and-more energy is required. Although bankers can print money, they cannot print energy!” The situations that we are facing is different from the Easter Islanders, oil is not yet running out. However, we do not have enough energy to get more oils which means lack of oils/loss of main resources. According to the article “Life after the Oil Crash”, in “What does all of this mean for me”, I think the predictions of how America will collapse is pretty reasonable. Everything is being tie up together and of course one will affect the other. “Permanent fuel shortages would tip the world into a generations-long economic depression. Millions would lose their jobs as industry implodes. Once affluent cities with street cafés will have queues at soup kitchens and armies of beggars. The crime rate will soar. The earth has always been a dangerous place, but now it will become a tinderbox. On the heels of their rapid financial ruin, people will now watch aghast as their food and water supplies dwindle in the face of a climate going awry. Prolonged droughts will spread, decimating harvests.” Lots and lots of predictions are being made by looking at the crash of oil. Which one of these nightmares should we believe?
We all know the problem, but we never get to the solution whether it is avoidable or inevitable. Reading on the article “Peak Oil Primer” about what can be done, it stated that, “Many people are working on preparations for peak oil at various different levels, but there is probably no cluster of solutions which do not involve some major changes in lifestyles, especially for the global affluent.” If people’s lifestyles have to be changed, does this mean civilization end? Nobody knows what will happen in the future, but I believe it is predictable based on what we did to ourselves. However, even the predictions are being made, how do we know which one to choose? People kept talking about when the world will end and when is the last time the sun rise. But we all are still living and breathing on this earth, how can we possibly know when this will really come true? Just like the Easter Islanders, if they know the tree that they are cutting is their last, they would have cut it anyway because they believe it is the last. Same to all the researches about collapse, we seem to know what will happen and probably start to plan something out to avoid it. But what happened if this is inevitable? Lastly, I still believe that knowing it and being aware of it, is better than knowing nothing about it.

Response to the Easter Island Chapter from Collapse

From reading the “Easter Island” chapter by Jared Diamond, what I find the most interesting of is the way he described the people who lived in Polynesia. “Yet Easter Island’s prehistoric Polynesian population had owned no canes, no wheels, no machines, no metal tools, no draft animals, and no means other than human muscle power to transport and raise the statues.” I was surprised that they could do such thing with such effort by erecting the heavy stones to build beautiful statues. As the reactions of the Europeans, “were incredulous that Polynesians, ‘mere savages’, could have created the statues or the beautifully constructed stone platforms.” Followed by his reading, when I read further and find out that the Easter’s geography, I was astonished that they could survive on their native lands. As the geographic factors that Jared Diamond described, the Easter Islanders has fewer food sources compared to the Pacific Islanders, and the weather/climate is not as good as the others’ which has affected the agriculture. However, “Easter Islanders did succeed in getting enough water for drinking, cooking, and growing crops, but it took effort.” Throughout the chapter, Jared Diamond has provided a lot of interesting facts about the Easter Islander’s history. Although they do not have a lot of domesticated animals or food compared to the Pacific Islanders, they are able to use what they have to live the best they can with effort. Such as the rocks they have has benefit them from having better soil to grow things. Though they do not have a lot of water, they have drink sugarcane juice to maintain their lives. More important, “While Polynesians lacked compasses and writing and metal tools, they were masters of navigational arts and of sailing canoe technology.” I thought that the Polynesians are amazing, and they are able to live through their life from advantages and disadvantages. Especially the way they constructed, transported, carved, and erected the statues without any machines. My reactions are similar to Jared Diamond that “what megalomania possessed its carvers”.

When Jared Diamond talks about the competitions that the Easter Islanders have over better statues, it is another interesting aspects that I find it incredulous. “The increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rival chiefs commissioning the statues to outdo each other.” Because of the competitions of statues trying to outdo the others, it caused them to collapse regarding on loss of resources. Such as the way Jared Diamond described, “Similarly displaying their wealth and power by building ever larger, more elaborate, more ostentatious houses”, it is a metaphor of what’s going on in our society. We are very similar to the Easter Islanders that we are competing for power and wealth. It also mentioned that because of the competitions over statues, “the work of constructing them added about 25% to the food requirements of Easter’s population over the 300 peak yeas of construction.” Because people are working so hard to build taller and better statues than the other clans, they have over used the food that they have. In addition to that, they have cut down more trees than they used to be, which lead to the tragedy of collapse. From the botanical surveys of plants, it said that “For hundreds of thousands of years before human arrival and still during the early days of human settlement, Easter was not at all a barren wasteland but a subtropical forest of tall trees and woody bushes.” Since the Easter Islanders used the trees for making canoes, ropes …etc to outdo the others, it caused deforestation. As it mentioned in the chapter, “the sizes of statues had been increasing may reflect not only rival chiefs vying to outdo each other, but also more urgent appeals to ancestors necessitated by the growing environmental crisis”. Without trees, the people in Easter Island could not fuel to keep themselves warm during winter, and it caused them to reduce many activities that relates to fuel. Furthermore, “most sources of wild food were lost”, which leads to starvation, population crash, then to cannibalism. Because of the mistakes that the Easter Islanders had made, it leads their society to collapse. "Easter's isolation makes it the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by over exploiting its own resources."

“The overall picture for Easter is the most extreme example of forest destruction in the Pacific, and among the most extreme in the world: the whole forest gone, and all of its tree species extinct. Immediate consequences for the islanders were losses of raw materials, losses of wild-caught foods, and decreased crop yields. Raw materials lost or else available only in greatly decreased amounts consisted of everything made from native plants and birds, including wood, rope, bark to manufacture back cloth, and feathers.” The quote basically draws my point of view of parallels between Easter Island and our civilization. In Easter Island, the main reasons that it collapsed are due to human environmental impacts, deforestation, and political, social, and religious factors. In our society, everything seems to be enough and we never thought of the day that things will run out. As what we talked about in class, and the previous unit, now a day everything is industrialized which it requires fossil fuels. If one day the main resources we needed is running out, all the machines will eventually stop. We resemble the Easter Islanders as the way Jared Diamond described one of the theories, “Easter Islander surely wouldn’t have been so foolish as to cut down all their trees, when the consequences would have been so obvious to them.” “Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood’?” I think most of us think like what Jared Diamond said; we rely on technologies to solve the problems for us instead of paying close attention to what is happening now. Other than that we have different situations as the Easter Islanders, I believe that our consequences will be very similar. I totally agree with what Jared Diamond said in the very end of this chapter that “if mere thousands of Easter Islanders with just stone tools and their own muscle power sufficed to destroy their environment and thereby destroyed their society, how can billions of people with metal tools and machine power now fail to do worse?” What has happened to the Easter Islanders is a metaphor of what is going to happen to us. Especially the way we cut down trees, and doing other things to harm the environment. (Pollution, global warming...etc.) In the end of the chapter, Jared Diamond said that "the reason for Easter's unusually severe degree of deforestation isn't that those seemingly nice people really were unusually bad or improvident. Instead, they had the misfortune to be living in one of the most fragile environments, at the highest risk for deforestation, of any Pacific People." This quote has make me feel even more certain that our society will collapse because we are improvident. Also, we are not in an environment that are highly risk for deforestation. Therefore, by looking at what is happening in our society, I do believe it will collapse. Like what Jared Diamond said, the metaphor is imperfect, but I still think that once the collapse happened, it is impossible for us to flee or turn for help just like the Easter Islanders.

Final Food Assignment

*Intro* (Why should we care/be aware of the food we eat?)

From the day we born to the last moment we die, we need food to survive. All our ancestors have been hunters and farmers who were responsible for their own food in order to make a living. But now, the whole society has transformed to an industrial system that nobody really grow their own food. We use fossil fuels to make the machines work, so everything will be fast and efficient. Simultaneously, harming the environment from pollutions of the machinery used in factories and industrial farms. Therefore, we ignored where our food come from other than knowing we bought it from the super markets, and what is it behind the food that we are eating. More importantly, we start to unappreciated the food we eat, and the animals that died just for us to have more food choices.

*Sources of "A Mother's Tale" and "Cows with Guns"* (Similarities Between Both Sources)

The story “A Mother’s Tale” by James Agee and the song “Cows with Guns” by Dana White are quite similar in terms of animal cruelty. Both enhance the idea of how animals are being born to die, and there are no way to escape from this because human are the superiors in the whole system. Such as the quote from the story by the Mother, “We are brought into this life only to be victims; and there is no other way for us unless we save ourselves.” Although the story are written in a perspective of how human think of the animals as putting the shoes into the animal’s feelings, and we do not really know how the animals feel, we can still assumed that the calves are born for human to eat on their hamburgers as it mentioned in “Cows with Guns”.

*Sources of "A Mother's Tale" and "Cows with Guns"* (Differences - Aniaml's P.O.V.?)

However, the story by James Agee makes the reader felt more pathetic for the animals and it creates a sense of guilt for people who eat meat. Also, it sets up a desperate mood demonstrating the calves because the Mother told the calves what the ancestors said, but no one is able to ensure the story is true. Whoever got on the train never came back or able to tell, which it makes the story more dramatic because it also reveals the reality of the animal’s lives. Their lives are really depending on us, and no matter what they do, it is impossible to escape from human. As it mentioned in the story, how the cow experienced the journey of getting caught and got on to the train. It is all about the issues of animal cruelty that we discussed in the previous class and videos that we watched.

*Sources of "A Mother's Tale" and "Cows with Guns"* (Differences - Natural vs. Animals)

In the story “A Mother’s Tale”, the differences between all other videos that are about animal cruelty related are that it mentioned how optimistic the cows are. Even they got treated badly by living in a place with smells that they are not familiar with, they still think on the bright side that the smell is just what the human been live with. The story delineates a picture of how animals are easily adapted to their nature surroundings that no matter where they got to, they would be able to adjust to it. This also reveals the fact that is us who suppose to adapt to where we are, not the surrounding to adapt to our way of living. That is the way we all living animals live in this universe. However, us, as human, we often try to go against how things are suppose to be. In other words, we go against how things are used to be such as producing industrial food. In one of the class we have discussed what is natural, and we turn out that we do not how to define this word. We talked about what is the natural way of killing an animal and it turned out to be that there is no such thing call natural way of killing. In addition to that, natural doesn’t mean it is right. From discussion, we have come to the conclusion that it is okay to kill the animals, but it is wrong to abuse the animals.

*Sources of "A Mother's Tale" and "Cows with Guns"* (Differences - Animals Put Their Shoes In Human)

Even more surprising were the animals actually thought the way they got treated is the way humans are treated also. “But soon the leaders among them concluded that it was simply the way men must smell when there are a great many of them living together. Those dark buildings must be crowded very full of men, they decided, probably as many thousands of them, indoors, as there were of us, outdoors; so it was no wonder their smell was so strong and, to our kind, so unpleasant.” Though we do not know how animals think or feel as how the story described, it still reveals the innocent of animal lives. Because we think we are superiors, therefore we think we have the priority to do whatever we want to the animals. We ignored the others, and think we are the center attention of the universe. The other animals cannot choose how they live as the discussion we have in class, they “they are not even on the table”. Is us who created the high technologies that caused the issue of animal cruelty and the deconstruction of farms. All these damages that we did to the earth have been ignored by people, and we still consume food that is industrial produced everyday to help the corporations to earn a great profit. Other than harming the animals, we are also damaging the nature. For all those fossils fueled that people used for machines, it pollutes the environment and contaminates a lot of the rivers and lakes. For the purpose of convenience, efficient, and speed, just for human, we have damaged the world to a place that is full of corpse.

*Connect to - Omnivore's Dilemma* (Michale Pollan's Theory & Agriculture of Industrialization caused Unappreciation of Food)

As the society that we live in right now, everything is about efficiency and getting better. Therefore, by using fossil fuels to make the technologies work, it changes our way of living. We no longer hunt for our own food, and grow our own food in a little garden. Now a day, most people go to the super markets and everything they needed would be there. Everything is fast, and easy to get. Therefore, people no longer appreciate the food they had as much as the people who grow their own food back then. People barely think about the meats they are eating are from animals who got treated badly throughout their life. Because we have no difficulties of getting food while thinking what we should eat every day, we no longer feeling grateful for what we have. We would not think about how the animals got put into fences got squeezed in a crowded place. We would not think about how the animals got treated by throughout their life time while we might think of whether it tastes good or the price of the food we are eating. Such as the theory that Michael Pollan has stated in his book “Omnivore’s Dilemma”, America does not really have a food culture like Italians, or French, Americans are obsessed with healthy and anxious about what to eat. This is all because we know so little about the food that we are eating! What most people are thinking, what they should eat that is healthy for them. Other than the problem of what to eat, we do not think of how to decrease the damage of our environments by stop treating animals in a cruel way using machinery, and pollutions from the fossil fueled.

*My Food Ways - connecting to "Our Daily Bread" & "Meatrix"* (Why still meat?)

By knowing all these things behind the food that I eat every day, it actually changes the way I look at food. I start to be aware of what I am eating and where they came from. However, I will still eat meat even though I watched the clips of “Our Daily Bread” “Meatrix”, and some others from Animal Cruelty, because I am being raise to eat meat. From learning the things behind my food, and actually understanding where they came from, it has deepened my knowledge about food, but not enough to change my daily habit of eating. Especially the movie of “Our Daily Bread”, it is not a cartoon like the “Meatrix”, it is real. From looking at how the animals got tortured, and get killed then got hang up to cut into different parts. It is extremely cruel compare with the videos on the “Animal Cruelty”. All these videos have shown the audience how the animals got treated badly, such as cutting into half first, then the feet, the intestine…etc. I personally think it is disgusting and inappropriate for the animals. But in the other hand, the animals are going to die anyway because humans do eat meat. Which raise the question, why does it matter if the animals are going to die anyway?

*My Food Ways* (Draw the difference between KILLING ANIMAL & ANIMAL CRUELTY )

I disagree with the way the industrial farm treated the animals throughout their life time as it shown in the movie “Our Daily Bread”, but I am not really against the way they cut the animals. There is no such thing call the natural way of killing the animals and natural doesn’t mean it is the right way to kill it. Therefore, I think by cutting the animals in that way are fine regardless of the fact that it is using machinery. (If the animals are being put to sleep then got kill, that is better than just killing it to frighten them) However, the way the industrial farm treated the animals are the part that I do not like and extremely against it. Not only just the animals are being treated badly, even the plants are being killed in few minutes with sprays of pesticides according to the movie. Eating meat/plant with appreciation is different from take it for granted. Now a day, in our food culture, what we care is how the food taste like and does it look pretty. We do not even think in our head while we eat that the piece of meat is from an animal who has suffered throughout their life in the industrial farm.

*Conclusion* (Sum up the Food Unit and How Did I Change From Learning this Unit?)

Instead of arguing whether industrialization of agriculture worth it or not, I would say that it is one of the biggest mistakes that we made as human beings. Being exposed to these “truths” about food, it really changes my way of looking at them. Although I still eat meat, my attitude towards the food I eat is appreciation. Not only appreciating the food and animals that died, also to the hard workers who pick the food for us. From going to the super markets looking at varieties of the same food and focus on my food ways to being exposed to the facts behind the food I ate has been a great unit that really changes my life. Because when I was in China, all the foods I ate are from the farmers’ market, and I never know the foods I eat now are from the industrial farm. Though is a change, I learned to appreciate the food more than I use to be. Other than staring at the television and eat my food as I take things for granted, I should have a sense of appreciation and gratification towards what I have.