The goal of Food Inc. is to lift the veil on our nation’s food industry and expose the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.
Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
Though I do recommend seeing this film, I don’t recommend stopping by the popcorn counter first!
YouTube Street Fighter is the classic game you know and love but played with a modern twist.
The game consists of an intricate series of videos that allow you to control your player using one of four buttons. Press a button at the right time, and you’ll make a move on your opponent and score some damage points. Move too late however, and you’ll be on the receiving end of a blow that will take some of your own health. Once one of the players has had enough, there are even ending sequences to finish him off.
The animation itself is actually done with a combination of action figures and stop motion, though it’s surprisingly smooth for a video game that’s hacked together out of YouTube clips and the clever use of linking buttons.
Since the early ‘80s, game designers have faced one question: Where can I hide health and ammo?
The answer was, of course, the crate! (And the crate’s circular cousin, the barrel.)
Unfortunately, this crate method of hiding supplies soon became the norm, and even great games began to suffer from excessive creating.
To determine which games have the best Start to Crate (StC) number (higher is better), Old Man Murray played through 26 games to see how long it takes to find a crate in each. (The shortest amount of time it takes a player to reach the first crate represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas.)
While one game managed to make it one hundred and twenty seconds without showing a crate, most fell in the five seconds or less category, and many even showed crates from the very beginning.
Thankfully, it’s not a crate emergency, though it is interesting to see just how widespread this problem is.
Can’t they just hide the ammo under a potted plant or something?
Today is Blog Action Day, which means that fifteen thousand blogs with a combined total of twelve million readers are going to be publishing posts about the environment.
Since I’m always down to support a good cause, I’m going to participate by giving you DYH’s Simple Rule To Live By: Do Something.
Being green doesn’t have to be a life changing decision. You don’t need to sell your car and buy a Prius; you don’t need to sell your Prius and buy a bike; and you certainly don’t need to recycle your bike and start walking everywhere; you just need to do something.
That’s because I believe that if everyone did something, then everything would change.
Why?
Because even small changes can make a difference.
Change a few light bulbs. Take a shorter shower. Recycle more. Drive less.
There are a million different things that you can do, so you just need to start doing them.
The key is to start small.
Soon, that single bulb will turn into a home full of CFLs, that shorter shower will turn into thousands of gallons of saved water, and that parked car will turn into a healthier you.
So just remember: Don’t try to change the world by yourself; just do something, and the world will follow.
Since the early ‘80s, game designers have faced one question: Where can I hide health and ammo?
Today is Blog Action Day, which means that fifteen thousand blogs with a combined total of twelve million readers are going to be publishing posts about the environment.
