What's Wrong with What We Eat

This is somewhat of a followup to a previous post I wrote back in April about the witnessing of the Halal ritual slaughtering of a goat in rural mountainous Morocco. The past week and a half has been intellectually stimulating and programmatically fruitful for me - I'm in the middle of revamping some leadership programs as well as formulating some new ones. The newest program, a sophomore followup to last year's freshman leadership co-curricular seminar, I've designed to utilize the best aspects of TED Talks, namely their inspirational nature and life-narrative focus. What does this have to do with this post? I'll explain.

I first came across Mark Bittman's name on my favorite food blog, 101 Cookbooks. I've done a lot of experimenting with recipes from this healthy, primarily vegetarian, blog. The writer of the blog, Heidi Swanson, features ideas and recipes from him ALL THE TIME and they're often quite tasty and are known to be simple and easy to prepare. He's also a columnist for the New York Times. So when I saw that he did a TED Talk, I had to watch, even though it wasn't *exactly* with the intention to use it for this program.

Watch this.

He's basically talking about the same stuff I was writing about in my previous blog entitled "Cow farts and the obesity epidemic." It's a pretty convincing argument, and he's funny too which helps. Couple this with the fact that I just got back from a trip with two college buddies who are both going into Urban Planning Master's degrees at prestigious universities (Columbia and MIT, somehow I ended up with smart friends...), one of whom is particularly interested in sustainable living and urban farming. Michael Pollan's 2007 book "The Omnivore's Dilemma" was brought up numerous times and I'm thoroughly convinced I need to read it... once I get to it on my very long reading list. It has similar themes of the need to seriously re-evaluate our consumption habits.

This proves difficult in the Arabian Gulf where virtually nothing is grown locally. "Local" for me is something grown in Saudi, Lebanon, Egypt, and sometimes even Turkey. I replaced a lot of my meat consumption with beans and legumes. I've started making more things that I've previously bought in cans (like hummus), and I pay much more attention to where products are coming from. But I feel like this still isn't enough.