Second and Third weeks of March...

These weeks we discussed the extent to which our diets can impact the environment and our health. We, and by we I am addressing Americans in particular, live in a world (which I could argue isn't the real world) where there is a McDonald's at every exit and Walmart provides most of our produce. What's up with that? How have we allowed these HUGE corporate entities to essentially hijack the food industry from mostly local farmers and gardeners in less than a century? 
Well, it all goes back to the lie of the lowest price. Americans are obsessed with the idea of saving money, because we have devoted our whole lives to the accumulation of it. McDonald's can give you a pretty filling meal for less than the cost of the New York Times. Seems like a pretty good deal right? Almost too good to be true? Well, in the real world, when something seems too good to be true, it almost invariably is. You are not paying the real cost of that Big Mac. Here's who is:

The cows in the CAFOs, crowded shoulder to shoulder and standing waist deep in their own excrement. They suffer short lives of discomfort from a corn-based diet and disease only to be killed without respect and have their meat shipped to a packing facility to be ground and mixed with the meat of thousands of other cows who met the same fate.

The chickens whose beaks are cut off and whose feet will never scratch the dirt for worms. They are stuffed in boxes soon after they reach their genetically accelerated maturity. They are fattened to the point of immobility, so that we can do the same to ourselves. 

The pigs, or whatever the McRib, may be made out of, who get corralled and killed by gassing because it is more "humane." After the lives they endure, any sort of death seems comparatively human I suppose. 

The workers in the McDonalds, who are paid alarmingly low salaries that can barely feed them and their children. They are promised upward mobility, when in truth they are fired and replaced at will by the corporate higher-ups. 

Your children, who can all too easily buy into the ploy of the Happy Meal, if you allow it. Childhood obesity is at the highest it's ever been, and fast food chains that prioritize red meat and greasy foods are largely responsible. If all they know is McDonald's, odds are they will take their own children there one day, the cycle will continue, and health conditions will worsen.

So, is it worth it?