Peak Oil

After reading the article on energy bulletin regarding to peak oil, I realized how close to the peak the world has come. I had understood previously that eventually we would run out, but I didn't think it would be so soon. In the article, the oil peak was predicted to occur in 2010. This was particularly surprising to me.

IFS Paper (revised a bit)

Guido Gonzalez
Food Class
Industrial Food Paper

Describe:
The Industrial Food System is a food system in which food products are mass produced in factories in the cheapest way possible. Almost everyone is involved; the workers producing it, the company owners making a profit off it, and everyone who buys/eats it. This industry is treated like any other industry; its only goal is optimum efficiency. My experience with it, like most people, had been unknown to me until recently. I had eaten industrialized food my whole life giving no thought to it. Even the food bought at the supermarkets comes from industrialized food companies. Obvious as it was, I had never noticed or given any thought to that. Almost every American eats with only that in mind; eating. They don’t think about where their food comes from or how it tastes, only about fulfilling their appetite.
Analyze:
The IFS is the primary source of U.S. nutrition because it is so fast, easily produced, and so cheap. Most Americans are so busy during their work day, they have to look for the most convenient, cheapest source of food. It is for this reason that the IFS is so successful.
There are many issues with the IFS, one of which being the diet of the animals. Corn is the main source of nutrition for these, the reason being that corn is the cheapest and easiest to grow, and it helps the animals grow fatter and faster. The animal’s stomachs are adept to digesting grass, they cannot digest the corn properly. Eventually, it causes their manure to become so toxic that it cannot be used to fertilize crops. The manure is instead dumped into a large pool of waste called “Manure Lagoons”. When it rains, this waste is leaked into rivers and eventually leads back to us. What once was a system in which there was essentially no waste, there is now almost nothing but waste.
These animals are also fed other animals, causing disease to spread (i.e. mad cow disease.) Because the main goal of the IFS is speed, mistakes are often made in cutting the meat. This causes the contents of the intestines to spill out all over the meat; shit is getting in our meat. The treatment of the animals is also a big issue in the IFS. They are crammed into small spaces with up to thousands of other animals, making disease much easier to spread. In the entire process, they are treated as though they’re already meat.
Another problem is with the workers in the factories and the fields of these plants. Most of the workers are immigrants, 2 million per year, having to work 10-12 hour shifts with no breaks for water or to use the bathroom. To earn minimum wage, they have to pick at least 4,000-5,000 pounds of tomatoes. The work pace is so intense and fast, that some of the workers begin taking methamphetamine in order to deal with the work conditions. A lot of them end up getting injured because of it. The essence of IFS is the most efficient, productive, cheapest way of achieving mass genocide.
Evaluation:
Any profit made goes to the owners of the companies. For the American community, the IFS seems to make more waste than profit. IFS got to where it is today because of America’s obsession with speed and money, and lack of morality. This tells us that, if we had morality to begin with, most of it has been lost and replaced with the motive for money and efficiency.

Comment on Gary's paper

This was good, although it did seem a bit redundant at point. Like when you talked about how corn is bad for the cows and that they can't digest it, and then you say pretty much the same exact point later in the paper. If you fix issues like that, your paper should have a better flow.

comment on brian's paper

This paper was good. It addressed most of the issues affiliated with the IFS. However, a trend in this essay was that you tended to ramble on for breif periods. There were also several gramatical errors that need to be fixed.

Posted on Markia's Blog:

Very interesting, very well written. You did a good job of expressing the health benefits and availablity of this diet. You didn't really express why it was an ethically good diet, which I can understand, there's not alot on ethics for this particular diet. Another thing was you never explained what LDL and HDL cholesteral were, and why they were bad for your body.

I'm curious, why is it that in this diet men drink 2 glasses of wine and women drink 1? Is that something to do with Greek tradition?

What's the deal with industrialized food?

When we went to the supermarket, I used the economic and nutritional lenses to examine the food. To do that, I looked at the price tags and nutrition facts on the packaging of each item and came up with this:
Morton Williams Cheesecake, $11.95
2 liter Pepsi, $1.75
-100 cal
-0 fat
-25 mg sodium
-27 g sugar
-0 protein
Ocean spray, $4.75
-0 fat
-35 mg sodium
-50 mg potassium
-35 mg sugar
-0 protein
Chips ahoy chuncky, $4.19
-4.5 g fat
-0 cholesterol
-55 mg sodium
-less than 1 g protein
Steak, $349/lb, 0.96 lbs, $3.35
Ground beef $2.99/lb, 1.22 lbs, $3.65
Quarted legs $0.99/lb, 2.30 lb, $228
Bunch carrots (4-5 per bunch medium sized), $1.69
Loose carrots (single, larger carrots), $1.99

Possible questions:
-How much does it cost for me?
-How much did it cost for the store?
-How much did it cost to produce it?
-How is this going to affect my body?
-Will I regret eating this?

Fast Food

For this assignment, I went into a 7-11. I bought a cup of hot chocolate, and a cinnimon roll. I got the hot chocolate out of a machine and added little marshmallows. I'm not sure if that actually changed the taste, but by the time i got home they were all melted. It did taste slightly sweeter I think. The cinnimon roll was extremely sweet, and it was pleasantly soft. It felt good eating at the time, but now it's a few hours after eating it, and I'm not feeling so great. It's pretty much all I had to eat today, and I think that was way too much sugar for my meal of the day. At the time it was so tempting. I don't normally eat stuff like this, in fact, I haven't in a while. I don't intend to again after this.