The disconnect between the generous array of food in supermarkets and how it is produced was explored in a movie screened in Tatura on Wednesday night.
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| The movie - Food Inc. |
“Food Inc”, filmed in 2008, showed the audience of 13 how the deception about our food arrives on our tables began with misleading advertising.
The image that our food came from traditional farms where chooks roamed free and cows grazed contentedly in open paddocks was shown to be a lie with the source of most foods being from industrialized farms in which the reverse was the norm.
Food Inc concentrated on the American market, but as one who watched the movie said; “It’s all scalable”.
“All those distressing American scenes are happening here, but to a lesser degree,” he said.
More detail about the movie, shown free by Transition Town Tatura, can be found here.
Coincidence is sometimes a little unsettling.
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| Sam Harris |
The movement to “Occupy Melbourne” had reached something of a crescendo as I neared the midway point of the book “Lying” by Sam Harris.
The book had been closed for the last time when the media erupted with the news that Victoria’s former Chief Commissioner of Police, Simon Overland, had been treated less than honestly.
Although not described so honestly and blatantly, he had been lied about and to.
The OccupyMelbourne people were protesting about corporate greed, a hunger for profits assembled legally and within the bounds of democracy, but which are frequently the proceeds of mischievous honesty and questionable egalitarianism.
However, as with many things it is not that simple, for close examination will quickly and easily show, that many protesting are simply using the medium as a vehicle to express a private grievance. They are, in fact, also lying.
Harris claims he had no specific memories of his values about lying before he took a course at Stanford University “The Ethical Analyst” which was built around the single question “Is it wrong to lie?”
He said that course “profoundly changed my life” and his book subsequently had a significant impact on my thinking.
Harris discussed the difficulties we all experience in maintaining our fidelity to a life of non-lying and the first personal identifiable encounter came after the recent John Furphy Memorial Lecture.
Traditional politeness elicits a degree of “harmless” lying as when talking with others about such orations; diplomacy displaces honesty.
Professor Geoffrey Blainey is a fellow who I respect and was looking forward to an uplifting and inspiring address and there were some high points, but broadly I was disappointed as he had used his rich historical knowledge to inculcate doubts about the science that legitimizes climate change.
Adhering to the new personal measure, not lying, it was at the after-lecture refreshments my first test emerged when others who had been at the lecture asked my opinion.
Explaining personal conflicts with Prof Blainey’s views, I was surprised, and delighted, to find that many others felt the same confirming that sometimes the sense of the crowd is to be of more value than that of authority – I use the term ‘crowd’ with some disquiet as it was really only about six people.
Lies, from white to black and every colour in between, seem to be the superstructure upon which life is built right from the supposed democratically elected most powerful man in the world to the appropriateness of you wife’s latest outfit.
Harris has described lying as the “royal road to chaos”, an observation certainly confirmed by the first of those lies with the second being subjective, for all parties.
