I chanced upon a very elaborate arrangement for recycling in our community today. Long instructions written on separation of what constitutes plastic and what doesn’t – to be sorted into three relatively tiny boxes that seemed more to tick a box (pun intended) rather than to actually provide a mechanism for true recycling.
A lot of cosmetic stuff floats around nowadays – things that make you feel like you are making a difference when in reality you are not. You need to make a systemic change externally and a lifestyle change internally, should you want to really lower the burden that you present to nature as a human being.
Also reminds me of something that I wrote a while earlier. Do read!
One of the perks (at least thinking of them this way makes it easier) of feeding toddlers is the playing of rhymes – makes it easier for the kid to eat and for the parent to feed. The downside is the obvious “tune-stuck-in-my-head” as collateral damage.
And so one night, as I lay with Rohāmrta playing the sitar on my hand as he tried to sleep, the Old MacDonald popped up in my head, right in the middle of my mental climate-change debate.
The modified version went something like this…
Old MacDonald had a farm,
Ee i ee i oh!
And on that farm he had some chicken,
Ee i ee i oh!
With a chop-chop here,
And a chop–chop there
Here a chop, there a chop,
Everywhere a chop–chop
The chicken is now a Big Mac,
Ee i ee i oh!
Well, the only thing that springs to mind when one hears “MacDonalds” is the ubiquitous fast “Not-food” seller, isn’t it?
One that has done his ample bit in lowering both the cost and the quality of food, as well as nailing a couple into the coffin of climate change.
But children go on singing odes to the good-ol Donald who had a farm full of sheep, chicken and ducks that soon may have found their way to the tables of good-meaning souls who thought organic and ate the opposite.
By the way, that isn’t the vegetarian in me speaking with spite. I merely wish (like many others now, including scientists of repute) that humanity found a way of eating less stuff that ate away the environment. We anyways eat more that needed, and the quality of our food has been on a downward spiral ever since we began mass-producing it.
Meat being a very important component of this. In India, most poor and middle class households would eat meat once or twice a week, and on occasions. Today, consumption has increased dramatically and with it, chicken and fish have now become units rather than living beings. Feed is packed into cages like sardines, and all they do during their short, miserable lives is wait for death while being fed just to pack on the pounds.
Humans are adept in making a mess of anything we touch.
Oh but wait, we do switch off our lights for an hour a year, during Earth Hour. And dump a tee-shirt or two in the neighborhood recycling bin, and retweet Greta ‘Angry” Thunberg – our work is done. We have made the world a better place.
And, as conclusion, pun intended, Food for Thought!