Entry #7 More Than Food

 Growing up on a small farm gives me a different perspective on food. One of the animals I helped raise was chickens. The first year when it came time to slaughter them, my parents thought it would be a good idea to make it a family affair, without any formal training, previous experience, or subject matter expert on site to show them how to most effectively do it. As you can imagine, it was an absolute disaster and I had a front row seat.

Just to confirm, yes chickens absolutely do run around headless for way longer than one might think. None of us expected it and the very first chicken ran off into the woods without a head. It was my job to go find it and I’ll just say I was gone for quite awhile trying to catch it. Well after that nightmarish experience we started taking our chickens to a slaughterhouse. Having been in a chicken slaughterhouse, much like the one in the film “Fresh” I randomly think about it when I’m eating chicken, even now as an adult. To this day I still do not know how anyone could work in a killing factory like that. I couldn’t even imagine the trauma of seeing and hearing death all around me for hours every day all week.

This film “Fresh” was a reminder of how our society is set up to keep us, the citizens, blissfully unaware of all the things that have to happen in order for us to maintain our lifestyles. Never mind the fact that we waste enough food everyday to feed our entire homeless population and more. I’ve personally seen managers instruct employees to dump chemicals like bleach and dirty mop water in trash bags full of food that the restaurant is throwing out so the homeless people don’t hang around and try to eat the food from the dumpsters.

Will Allen from the film “fresh” reminds me of my dad so much because my dad was a boxer and football player. He was a tall built guy that nobody expected to be so knowledgeable about farming just from looking at him. But every year we would bring kids from the city out to our farm to see where potato chips came from and how carrots grow. It was part of a 4-H program that we were all involved in. Much like in the film, my dad is very charismatic and felt at home talking to a large group of people. His parents owned a soul food restaurant that he worked at growing up so he was used to cooking large vats of food for strangers. The film “fresh” allowed so many people to get a peek behind the curtain of our food industry and I’m sure it opened a lot of peoples eyes.