Ethan Shubert

This week, I decided to buy only what I need, something that I practice most of the time anyway. I am usually quite conservative with my money. I did end up ordering a pair of shoes for work, but I determined by working in my current worn-down ones that I needed a new pair to stay healthy while working on a concrete floor all day.

I watched the 2016 food documentary "At the Fork." It was interesting because it showed various aspects of beef, pork, and chicken production that I didn't know about. One important point in dairy production was the use of gestation crates with no wiggle room in highly mechanized dairy farms. As for pork, it was nice to see that some farmers are letting the pigs roam freely in forested areas, which seems to prevent many health problems as well. Interestingly, pasture-based egg farms largely avoided the 2015 avian flu pandemic, whereas more-industrialized farms suffered major losses. There was a plethora of other facts I learned from the documentary, but the film focused only on beef & dairy, pork, and chicken & egg production. One thing that could have been improved in the documentary was the sense of direction: the film seemed to shift back and forth aimlessly between showing pork, chicken, beef, dairy, and egg farms.