Here's a non food post, Chris Jordan(Seattle) a photo artist who highlights our culture and explores our relationship with waste and environment. His images are amazing pieces of art work, he uses photographs of discarded garbage and create very intricate large art mosaics. Quite disturbing are the facts & statistics that is attached to each work.
http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7
Here's what his website says This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.
My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.
The huge image in view.
The actual image at close up, when you zoom in.
On Waste and our Culture
The Real Banana Republic
The Banana or the Cavendish banana, more popularly known as the Del Monte banana is facing extinction through the Sigatoka Fungus and Panama disease. Because of its unique reproductive system, its sexless, seedless and reproduced from only cuttings. Every single banana is a clone, having exact genetic codes. So without any genetic outliers, any diseases or epidemics can wipe out the whole variety before it can develop any immunity. Its popular predecessor, Gros Michel banana (popular before 1950s) was commerically annihilated by the same fungus.
Here's an interesting book, 'Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World' by author Dan Koeppel.
Koeppel explains the history of of the banana, and how the cavendish banana came to be a popular variety in our supermarkets. He also gave some insight on the Banana Republics of Central America, a little dark history of corporate america like United Fruit Company igniting civil wars in Central America.
The book gives a harsh look at the food production corporations with their mono-cultures. Quite a bleak future of food.
However there are some things I do disagree, like his views of genetic modification and organic farming. His solution is the use of genetic modified banana (the present variety is GM, hello) and disagrees that going into organic farming is not the solution, even though he acknowledges that bananas are one of the crops that are heavily sprayed with pesticides.
Npr.org does an radio interview with Dan Koeppel,
go check it out at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19097412
How Cuba survived their Addiction to Oil
“The soil takes millions of years to form, and to destroy - it takes very little time.” -Miguel Salcines
Miguel Salcines is the garden administrator for the Organipónico de Alamar, a 0.7-hectare farm in a Havana suburb. It is one of the most successful urban organic farms in Cuba and is run by a worker’s collective.
Documentary : The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oilhttp://www.powerofcommunity.org
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba's economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half – and food by 80 percent – people were desperate. This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call "The Special Period." The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis – the massive reduction of fossil fuels – is an example of options and hope.
Megan Quinn of The Community Solution discusses her visit to Cuba, and the movie "The Power of Community". This young woman sees Peak Oil as an opportunity to create the communities we want, but notes that we must reduce our consumption despite environmentalists' assurances that biofuels will save us.
The Documentary on You-Tube
Part 1 http://youtube.com/watch?v=rsnuTb4V9Qo
Part 2 http://youtube.com/watch?v=IwfTSKKThNs
Part 3 http://youtube.com/watch?v=AOnCiFT0x8I
Part 4 http://youtube.com/watch?v=Gt03SSLRXco
Part 5 http://youtube.com/watch?v=7mYEj0Zxi4A
Part 6 http://youtube.com/watch?v=r2ieJWdGZ08
Gerson Therapy : Alternative Cancer Program
2 in 3 of the few people I know either have cancer or has a family member who has cancer or has a close family member who died from it. One of my very own family member has it. A very personal friend has died from it, another close friend is suffering from it.
Now I don't have that many friends, 2 out of 3 people i know is a LOT to handle!
I am CONCERNED!
People are dying from this growing number one killer. Can it be the food we eat, the environment, the pollution? What's going on here? Why are we getting cancer?
My country, Singapore is barely even coping with this dis-ease, our cancer centres are getting over-burdened by the increasing population suffering from it. The only legally recognised treatment is by bombing our bodies with radiation, pumping our bodies with radio-active material (Chemo-therapy) and cutting the bad bits out through surgery. How is that gonna help when the cure is even much dangerous than the dis-ease?
The family was looking for alternative therapy for one of my close family member who was diagnosed with it few months back. Somehow we were guided to Gerson Therapy, GT. It is not an easy program that requires a strict diet of organic produce, juicing throughout the day and eating only specific vegetables and no meats. I might share a little bit more on my experiences with GT in my future post.
I must stress that there are lotsa alternative treatments out there, so keep an open mind and find one that suits you.
It's a little draggy, and has a very annoying and distracting background music, and often a very long-winded and somewhat irritatingly horrible narration, bad editing and direction with some boring parts. Its an one hour half long movie, and with the slow connection on You-tube, it might be a little longer. So pardon the whole boring bits, get through it and you be rewarded.
It does give a little information about what the therapy is all about and how people are cured from it. Just another alternative treatment without poisoning our bodies with radio-active chemicals or surgery in order to cure ourselves.
You can buy the latest book by Charlotte Gerson (daughter of the founded, Max Gerson), "Healing, the Gerson Way, defeating cancer and other illness",it's released just this year.
Chapter 1 Gerson Miracle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW7TVs37tuo
Chapter 2 The Discovery
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpqsfVd7In8
Chapter 3 The Gerson Institute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPtOCd7aV-8
Chapter 4 Poisoning Ourselves
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MERT-F63CTI
Chapter 5 Detox, the Clinic, Patients
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgFKJrB3O2g
Chapter 6 Debbie and Stephanie, Patients
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlV5_hKtOhM
Chapter 7 Medication, and Organic Farming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nqS3nXknv4
Chapter 8 About our depleted food
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb2G9wMAoLg
Chapter 9 Lead and Poison
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69tbAenq_UQ
Chapter 10 Various Cancer and Diseases
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj756Eu9ryw
Chapter 11 What Matters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ohavhSRmw
If you wanna download the entire movie and watch it off-line, you can access it here
http://www.gerson.org/videos/default.asp
The Price of Sugar
Ever wonder where sugar comes from?
source : http://www.thepriceofsugar.com/priceofsugarpics
/Armedsugarcanefieldguard_WalterAstrada_Cleared.jpg
Yes folks, Sugar, 'the white gold' started the Slave trade back in the 1500s.
As with most of the documentaries out there, it's all about a White activist Spanish priest trying to help the black impoverished natives of Haiti. Consider it is quite ironical, since it was the Spanish Catholic priests back in the 1500s that encouraged the slave trade in the Americas.
A Catholic priest named Bartolomé de las Casas asked King Ferdinand of Spain to protect the Taino Indians of the Caribbean by importing African slaves instead, hence started the whole slave trade.)
It does bring out the issue, the corrupted globalised trade commodity corporations.
Does that make you wonder about the food source we eat? How they get produced, who produces them?
Well, do you even care? I don't think You really Care! You selfish bastard! WAKE UP!
Go watch the documentary!
From the website, http://www.thepriceofsugar.com/
"The Price of Sugar" follows a charismatic Spanish priest, Father Christopher Hartley, as he organizes some of this hemisphere's poorest people, challenging powerful interests profiting from their work. When he arrives in the Dominican Republic, he's warned against entering the sugar plantations where most of his parishioners live. Breaking a centuries old taboo, he discovers shocking examples of modern-day slavery intrinsic to the global sugar trade.
On an island known for tropical beauty, tourists flock to escape winter and relax with little knowledge that just a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are toiling away in unseen plantations harvesting sugarcane most of which ends up in the United States. Cutting cane by machete, they work 12 hour days, 7 days a week frequently without access to decent housing, electricity, clean water, education, healthcare and adequate nutrition. Often they are stateless, with neither Dominican nor Haitian identity and virtually invisible in the eyes of the law.
One Man One Cow One Planet
Our finite food source is severely contaminated by multi-national corporations hell-bent on making of profits by poisoning the world's produce with chemicals, genetic engineering and nano-technology.
Is this truly the future of food?
Are we gonna perish from all the environmental degradation that the Corporations have cursed upon us?
I missed watching this documentary, 'How to Save the World: One Man One Cow One Planet' in Singapore because a friend had to leave at the beginning of the free screening and I had to leave together. [Mental note to self: shouldn't ask anyone to accompany you to anything remotely interesting if they don't have time to join you, then you don't have to spend more money to buy the dvd online when you can get to watch it free.]
The documentary is about an elderly New Zealander, Peter Proctor who ventured to India with the attempt to revert Indian agricultural farmers back to the old ways of farming. He uses techniques based on Rudolf Steiner's method of bio-dynamic farming.
Shame on you for those of you who still don't know what Bio-dynamics is about!
Bio-dynamic farming is a method of holistic farming that balances the relationship between soil, plant and animal life as one closed self developmental system. It is quite in par with what Buckminster Fuller had mentioned in Operating Manual : Spaceship Earth about sustainability
The most important thing about Organic farming, is not just having your produce be free of chemicals and artificial fertilisers but also about the nutritional quality of the produce, the soil management and overall farming system. (will go into details on organic produce in a later post).
All things said, I remain cynical, this world is corrupted and hopeless. It's the top people that needs to be changed.
One man's story about changing the world in his own way or so says the trailer.
Here's what the website http://howtosavetheworld.co.nz have to say:
Why YOU should see this film
- Modern agriculture causes topsoil to be eroded at 3 million tons per hour. (that’s 26 billion tons a year)
- Human mass is replacing biomass and other species. The carrying capacity of the earth is almost spent.
- To maintain our comfort zone lifestyles we will soon need five earths to sustain us in the style to which we have become accustomed.
- The mantra of free trade has failed the world’s poor. There is a better way.
- Human created climate change is destroying the Planet. Ecosystems collapse is not some sci-fi fantasy. It is real and it is happening. Right now.
- Biodynamic agriculture may be the only answer we have left.
Wow! I hope the world is gonna be saved!http://youtube.com/watch?v=diD36usbbrw
Zen and The Art of Cooking
Documentary : How to Cook Your Life
To be released in Nov-Dec 2007 in the United States. Looks interesting, I missed it when it was screening in Singapore during the Buddhism Film Festival in May 2007, http://www.asianbuddhistfilmfest.org/
Some back history on the influence of this movie's main foundation;
If you are interested is what Zen - Art of Cooking is about.
You can check out Master Eihei Dogen Zenji (1200-1253) the founder of Soto Zen, and his book "Instructions for the Tenzo(Chief Cook)" - of anyone working in the kitchen, or anyone sitting zazen(seated mediation position)—is how to be present, fully present, moment by moment, without being caught by either past or future, or like or dislike.
And the same book but difference translation "Refining Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment"
Who is Master Dogen: http://www.terebess.hu/zen/mesterek/dogen.html
From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, Refining Your Life: http://www.intrex.net/chzg/mel11.htm
A COOKING CLASS WITH ZEN PRIEST AND CHEF EDWARD ESPE BROWN
“Select the rice and prepare the vegetables by yourself with your own hands, watching closely with sincere diligence. You should not attend to some things and neglect or be slack with others for even one moment. Do not give away a single drop from within the ocean of virtues; you must not fail to add a single speck on top of the mountain of good deeds.”Edward Espe Brown
Edward Brown has been practicing Zen for over forty years, teaching in San Francisco as well as across the USA and Europe. And in case you think this is all New Age, California, touchy-feely, 800 years ago Master Eihei Dogen Zenji, the founder of the Japanese Soto-Zen school, wrote a cookbook in which he taught that it is possible to discover Buddha in even the simplest of kitchen duties, such as washing rice or kneading dough, and so reflect on one’s own actions and behavior in the world.
From “Instructions for the Cook” by Zen master Dogen, 1238 AD.
Review of the Movie is found here http://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=12,4131,0,0,1,0
Documentary: American Farm
James Spione, Director
From the website : http://www.americanfarmmovie.com
In this moving portrait of a vanishing way of life, documentary filmmaker James Spione explores the century-long struggle of his mother’s family to maintain a small dairy farm near Cooperstown, New York. Drawing on remarkably intimate interviews with three generations of Ames family members, Spione chronicles the backbreaking work, agricultural innovation and determination in the face of tragedy that led to the success of the operation. At the same time, American Farm reveals the profound shifts in attitude that have created the current crisis: no one in the next generation is willing to take over the farm. As he approaches seventy years of age, the director's cousin Langdon is now faced with selling a property that has been the center of family life for 150 years. Narrated entirely by the people that grew up there, American Farm is both powerful tribute to, and sober demystification of, one of America’s most hallowed and least understood institutions.
Documentary : The Future of Food
This documentary was written and directed by Deborah Koons, produced by Catherine Butler and Deborah Koons. It was released in 2004, and had quite a large You-Tube following last year. Apparently the documentary mysteriously disappeared off the video shelves and hence some nice folks started uploading it all over the torrent world.
Taken from the website http://www.thefutureoffood.com/
"We used to be a nation of farmers, but now it's less than two percent of the population in the United States. So a lot of us don't know a lot about what it takes to grow food."
There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America -- a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat.
THE FUTURE OF FOOD offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.
From the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada to the fields of Oaxaca, Mexico, this film gives a voice to farmers whose lives and livelihoods have been negatively impacted by this new technology. The health implications, government policies and push towards globalization are all part of the reason why many people are alarmed by the introduction of genetically altered crops into our food supply.
Shot on location in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, THE FUTURE OF FOOD examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat as huge multinational corporations seek to control the world's food system. The film also explores alternatives to large-scale industrial agriculture, placing organic and sustainable agriculture as real solutions to the farm crisis today.
Here's the first 10mins of it on You-Tube :(To the Movie producers : please don't sue me because of this link)
