- Your thoughts about the vanishing of bees (what else have you heard/seen about this issue?)
I was shocked to find industrial bee farms are using unnatural tactics to mate queen bees and add syrup into the bee hives. They are killing queen bees who can live up to five years and introducing artificial queen bees into the hive. Of course problems are going to come up because bees are not intended to live that way. Humans are the ones twisting and changing things up out of greed and in the end we are negatively affected.
- Dirt!: The Movie
A huge theme I was getting from the movie is the relationship between the person and the dirt. I've never thought about dirt as more than as dirt so the movie was pretty perspective changing for me.
- Were you able to discover if there is a factory farm near you? Were you already aware of farms near you? What do you think about this?
The closest factory to me according to the factory farm map is in Fresno County which is about 200 miles away from SF. Most updated data from 2012 shows on average there are 1,787,706 broilers at a site. That's a tremendously amount of animals on one site. People often say there's nothing to do in Fresno which makes sense because there are so many industrial farms there. Residents of Fresno are exposed to factory farm health risks that come from spread of diseases from overcrowded conditions.
- Composting: Do you currently compost? Have you composted in the past? Do you know anyone who composts?
I have been composting for many years but I didn't always compose. When I lived in China, every household only had one trash bin where everything went into. No one was sorting the garbage. But when I lived in Japan, the trash system was so thoroughly organized (ex: different colored glass bottles go into different bags)and everyone adhered to it. My mom is super on top of trash sorting and would call out on me or my dad if we threw something away in the wrong bin.
I was shocked when I heard about the queen bees being fed sugar syrup and it reminds me of the high fructose corn syrup and sugary drink problem in America. It's a quick fix for some calories, but after the long term the effects start to creep up on you. I was so sad to hear the same thing is happening to the bees to save money :(
ReplyDeleteThat's really intriguing about how you grow up organizing garbage differently in different countries. I've always appreciated how organized some countries can be (I have experience with that in Italy), and I wonder what it would take for America to get on board. In regards to your comment about Dirt being sort of humanized also sparked my paradigm shift. When the kids were playing in the dirt barefooted and throwing it in the air, all I could think of was the potential bacteria and other pathogens that might be in it. However, with the creation of temperature-controlled homes with dirt and water essentially, I was amazed.
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