Nick Reed: Exploration 4- Fresh Response

When watching and listening to Fresh many themes and ideas were present, but the re-occurring theme of industrialization of the food industry is that Americans have this specific mindset that the more we produce of something and the more available it will be, the better off we will be in the long term. However, Fresh  did an excellent job of proving that Americans should not have this mindset at all and are actually ignoring the consequences that seem to tag along with the industrialization process. Professor John Ikerd was a voice that came up frequently in the documentary when discussing this topic and he even said, "We just get obsessed with productivity and want more free stuff... we're facing the inevitable." Ikerd is right in this regard when the film discussed the topic of monocultures. The director of the film, Ana Sofia Jones, displayed images of monocultures of crops and how they required many synthetic nutrients and pesticides in order to function properly to live. She also displayed how the industrialization of livestock, specifically cattle, led to monocultures of them and these monocultures of livestock would produce hundreds of thousands of toxic waste per year and even formed diseases such as Mad Cow Disease and E-Coli that seemed to pop up more frequently and became a more "sturdy" of diseases in monocultures.

The documentary, with a reviewer's perspective, was very good. Fresh did a great job at making you think about where our food actually comes from, but provided a twist on how great our food can actually be. It focused on how easy it was and how profitable this new age of farming could be, which would seem appealing to farmers, but also incorporated the Will Allen segment that pushed the idea of healthy eating and growing of food into our heads. More specifically, it made a point of how easy it could be for the non-farmer demographic. The documentary did a good job of touching on all bases. 

A possible topic that came up in the documentary was the possibility of creating more and more resistant bacteria that cause diseases. Before this documentary I was aware that bacteria could evolve to become a "super bacteria" that can develop to be resistant to antibiotics , but have never really thought of the possibility of the bacteria being present in our food and, eventually, reaching us. Upon further research, I learned that the link between bacteria becoming more resistant to antibiotics and us becoming sick because of the bacteria in meat has yet to be determined. However, it does not mean that this resistant bacteria has not gone away completely and we can not get sick because of it in the future. It exists and is only going to become more and more resistant over time in the monocultures of livestock that they thrive in. Once that happens, we're unsure if the medical field will be able to produce antibiotics fast enough or strong enough that could potentially counteract these super strands of bacteria.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17600481