World Changing Response #1

Kristen Zelenka

World Changing Response #1

For my first response to World Changing, I read an article entitled “The Future of Food.” I chose this article because it is relative to what we have been learning in class and I became a pescaterian four months ago and before that rarely eat meat, and mostly out of politeness at friends houses. I decided to fully go change my diet after my friend who is a vegan finally convinced me. She has been a vegan now for five years. She is the first one to start explaining to me the bad practices we have growing our crops and raising livestock and then this class has given me more concrete examples and a better understanding of where my food comes from.

In the article I read it discussed the differences between smart breeding crops and transgenic crops. I knew that different strain within a certain species of crops were breed together to produce a new strain of crop but I did not know that there were scientists who were working on combining a tomato’s DNA with the DNA from a salmon. I do not think that we should be doing that because of the possible aftermath of side effects that we do not know about yet. The nutritional value of the food also goes down. However, I do think that the research being done to create New Rice for Africa is very important to improving the standard of living for thousands of people in that region. I also believe that type of genetic modification makes more sense than some of the other mutations going on in laboratories.

I believe that more farmers should adapt practices like the One Straw Revolution. I know that the process to transfer from our current means of farming to one more natural will take time. The benefits though will surely outweigh the cost eventually. People need to become more aware of where their food comes from and governments need to respond to the damages they see in the environment and regulate the production of food in order to see results.