I tried to think of a cool name for this, but it's still going to be called 'Health'

One of the central issues, for me, throughout the entire Anthro Food class in the past month, was health. Most directly and obviously, it was the health benefits of eating green, organic and locally as opposed to eating random store-bought, over-processed, exported imported then exported again 'food'.

I'll admit, the choice is easy. Especially in Asia, health is very important, for even if a man has led a poor life, if he is healthy throughout then it can be said that his life was good. So, being an Asian, my health is important to me; I don't want to grow a tentacle out of my waist or get cancer or have multiple organ failure stemming from heart failure when I'm forty years old or something. I've learned in the class that food is important to the healthy being of a person, since it regularly goes in our bodies.

There was an article we read that said bigger produce actually has less nutrition. Industrial agriculture's big aim is to have bigger produce to increase yields, and this led me to believe that eating green and locally is good for me, because it's got less crap in it, and it was grown with more individual care than factory farmed produce, so it will probably have more nutrients and good stuff. These are things that I learned through the class, before which I would have never imagined the effect of factory farms and industrial agriculture on the food that goes into us that in turn affects our health and well-being.

Books like Omnivore's Dilemma put all this into perspective, bringing into play the visual aspects of pigs and cows crammed together in a shed, suffering in their own waste, drowning in fat-enriched corn-feed. These are the same pigs and cows that we've fed ourselves on, are still feeding ourselves on, and I can't believe that this is healthy for anyone involved, at all.

More importantly, however, I feel the health of the land and the animals is far more paramount. As much as organic and green foods are good for people, I came to realize that they are even better for the land and the earth. Tomatoes are raised entirely without pesticides and chemical fertilizers, so they are no longer responsible for water poisoning and strange mutations in wildlife around them. Cows and pigs are put back in normal conditions and are raised healthily on grass lands and big barns. This runs contrast to the dead zone that industrial agriculture is creating in the Gulf of Mexico and the myriad sicknesses that over-use of anti-biotics in modern animal farming has caused.

So, for me, through this class, I've learned of the importance of local/green foods and their relation to an improvement in not only my health, but the health of the earth that we live on and the health of the animals that we live with. That, ultimately, is the point in my mind: by helping ourselves in this problem, we also help the earth. Why not?