At Cumberland Street, we saw a sustainable rooftop garden. The garden was full of nutritious vegetables and spices to sell to stores and restaurants. The gardener even grew edible flowers and supplied chickens to produce eggs. Technology like weather machines and sprinklers help the plants thrived and keep watered under the best conditions. The workers had supplied chickens to produce eggs. Nothing was wasted; eggshells were used as compost and reusable waste was recycled to make fertilizers. The garden is good for the environment because it is grown with carefully without any contamination.
The film that we saw in class was hosted by Yul Kwon, explains how plants and vegetable are mass produced in America. Many farmers have encountered unwanted insects so they had to use pesticide onto the vegetables. Pesticides are harmful because kills living things that are beneficial to us like bees. However, there were also some farmers that didn’t use pesticides, and grew organic vegetables to keep their consumers and producers healthy. These organic plants can’t be mass produced, so they were only sold to smaller markets.
The two articles we read explain how agriculture is important to the food systems. Michael Pollan wrote a letter to Obama about the food campaign that Obama promised to fulfill. Large amounts of fossil fuels were used for chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and ‘processed foods of all kinds’, are increasing the health care costs. Obama said that he will make changes, but nothing has changed. My thoughts of why Obama cannot get the task done is because he thinks it is unnecessary for making changes with the methods on food cultures.