Food for the Mind

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It’s important for everyone to constantly challenge their own perspective and to find inspiration to make the world around them a better place. Life is full of wonders and we can explore them all through watching documentaries. It’s an easy way to learn more about the world and expand one’s knowledge base

Following is a list of websites and video documentaries that inspired me and are related to food and the environment it comes from:

Informative Sites

Pig Pageant

Pigs doing card tricks? Yes! People who try to figure it out often suggest that the card was scented in some way. No, it was not scented and there was nothing special about the deck of cards. Smart pigs or? The video was released on April 1st.

Organic Alberta

Organic Alberta programs are designed to support and grow Alberta’s entire organic industry.
Read more about the programs

Interesting Video Documentaries

There is a plethora of documentary evidence of the tampering, corrupting and defiling of our food supply and profiteering from such practices.

Many of the following videos are available on YouTube or elsewhere on the web. You must find the others, perhaps by borrowing or purchasing the original content.

For perhaps obvious reasons, many of these video documentaries are released under an Open Source or Creative Commons copyright license.

Video Listing

Kiss the Ground

Kiss the Ground is an inspiring and groundbreaking film that reveals the first viable solution to our climate crisis. Kiss the Ground reveals that, by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies.

Watch on Netflix

(The) Corporation

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern-day corporation. This is explored through specific examples. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to affect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person.
The documentary concentrates mostly upon North American corporations, especially those in the United States.

One theme is its assessment of “personality”, as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite[nb 1] led to corporations as “persons” having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Deconstructing Dinner

A media for reconstructing food systems

Through this documentary series created by Jon Steinman and Declan O’Driscoll, its informative webisodes, and an interactive web site, Deconstructing Dinner invites us to rediscover food – in our kitchens, our communities, and through one of our most precious assets… our sense of taste.

Welcome to Deconstructing Dinner

In each of the six episodes, Jon teams up with local farmers, scientists, backyard gardeners and award-winning chefs like Michael Anthony (Gramercy Tavern), John Sundstrom (Lark), Blaine Wetzel (Willows Inn), Michael Stadtlander (Eigensinn Farm), Heather Carlucci (formerly of PRINT) and Mark Picone (Niagara College). With the help of these chefs, Jon Steinman explores, demystifies and deconstructs six popular foods– Wheat, Tomatoes. Pork, Garlic, Honey and Eggs.

Earth from Space

This is where your food comes from – get the bigger picture. The groundbreaking two-hour special that reveals a spectacular new space-based vision of our planet. Produced in extensive consultation with NASA scientists, NOVA takes data from earth-observing satellites and transforms it into dazzling visual sequences, each one exposing the intricate and surprising web of forces that sustains life on earth.

Farmageddon

Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

Farmageddon is the story of a mom whose son healed from all allergies and asthma after consuming raw milk, and real food from farms. It depicts people all over the country who formed food co-ops and private clubs to get these foods, and how they were raided by state and local governments.

(The) Foods that Make Billions: The Age of Plenty

This major new series tells the untold story of how big business feeds us by transforming simple commodities into everyday necessities and highly profitable brands.

See the episodes here

King Corn

King Corn is a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation. The above 20 minute clip from PBS gives you an overview of the full length film.
In the film, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the east coast, move to the heartland to learn where their food comes from.

With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat—and h
ow we farm.

(The) Future of Food and Seed

Scientist, feminist, ecologist and author, Vandana Shiva, presenting the keynote address at the 2009 Organicology Conference in Portland, Oregon, on February 28, 2009.

Seeds Of Death

This award-winning documentary, Seeds of Death, exposes the lies about GMOs and pulls back the curtains to witness our planet’s future if Big Agriculture’s new green revolution becomes our dominant food supply.

The leaders of Big Agriculture–Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta–are determined that world’s populations remain ignorant about the serious health and environmental risks of genetically modified crops and industrial agriculture. Deep layers of deception and corruption underlie both the science favoring GMOs and the corporations and governments supporting them.

(The) World According to Monsanto

Be prepared for some challenging truths and be warned, our governments are being exposed for the puppet pretend democracies they are…. big BUSINESS calls the shots. People …. just in the way of their progress. We can change our fate, if we unify and use the only weapon feasible to beat the global elite (major share holders in Monsanto) People Power. uploaded by Uploaded by eboyuk on May 18, 2011

Monsanto (now merged with Bayer) is the largest agricultural biotechnology company in the world. They are also the planet’s leading producer of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, a process that promotes the manipulation of traits which naturally occur in plants and crops.

There’s nothing they are leaving untouched: the mustard, the okra, the bringe oil, the rice, the cauliflower. Once they have established the norm: that seed can be owned as their property, royalties can be collected. We will depend on them for every seed we grow of every crop we grow. If they control seed, they control food, they know it — it’s strategic. It’s more powerful than bombs. It’s more powerful than guns. This is the best way to control the populations of the world. The story starts in the White House, where Monsanto often got its way by exerting disproportionate influence over policymakers via the “revolving door”. One example is Michael Taylor, who worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1991. While at the FDA, the authority that deals with all US food approvals, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, becoming the company’s vice president for public policy.

Thanks to these intimate links between Monsanto and government agencies, the US adopted GE foods and crops without proper testing, without consumer labeling and in spite of serious questions hanging over their safety. Not coincidentally, Monsanto supplies 90 percent of the GE seeds used by the US market. Monsanto’s long arm stretched so far that, in the early nineties, the US Food and Drugs Agency even ignored warnings of their own scientists, who were cautioning that GE crops could cause negative health effects. Other tactics the company uses to stifle concerns about their products include misleading advertising, bribery and concealing scientific evidence.

What are Roundup Ready & Bt Pesticide GMO crops?

Here is a great explanation on GMO and Bt pesticide. A must watch documentary by David Suzuki.

Reverse Climate Change

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.