Taking my geekiness to the next level

Halloween--another holiday that Kiwis have failed to appreciate completely. I saw a couple kids out trick-or-treating, but most people don't have candy ready by the door. Moms coordinate with each other and drive their kids around to the few homes with lollies available. The kids are definitely not going to get hundreds of pieces of candy per hour like I did. When Halloween rolled around each year, I was usually still working on the candy from last year's stash. This year in NZ I celebrated Halloween by attending a horror movie night. We watched Seven, Halloween, and Candyman, of which I though Seven was the best.

Also on Halloween I worked on the Habitat House, this time hanging gib (drywall). This is my favorite part of house construction because it requires a fair amount of spacial awareness to cut the pieces so that they fit to the walls and ceiling. It can be frustrating when a piece doesn't quite fit into place and you have to shave it off a few millimeters.

On Sunday I went to the movie theater to see Food, Inc. The main adviser to the filmmakers was Michael Pollan, and I've read a lot of stuff by him, so most of the information wasn't new. However, it was good to see pictures of industrial farming; in particular chicken coups. Farmers house thousands of chickens in one fully enclosed, dark,and remarkably unsanitary building. The chickens are so crowded they can barely move. But even if they weren't crowded, the chickens have been selected for to have massive breasts so they can only take a few steps before toppling over. Once the chickens are taken to the processing plant, you can see that the floor is covered with faeces and dead chickens. The movie also talked about beef processing and E. coli 0157:H7 outbreaks. There are only a dozen beef processing plants in the U.S. owned by four of five major corporations, and they are massive factory/assembly line operations. The workers have just one specific job like in an auto factory and are treated poorly and underpaid. When you eat a hamburger, you're literally eating meat from a thousand different cows, so it's now wonder that disease spreads quickly and it's tough to track down the origin of an outbreak.

I really like meat, but the number of reasons not to eat meat from factory farming are really overwhelming. If someone offers me meat at a dinner party I'll eat it, but I'm definitely not going to buy any from the supermarket on my own. I'm going to focus on fish and the occasional grass-fed organic beef and chicken you can get at a farmer's market.

I've made a DnaK rap and posted it on Youtube. Watch at your own risk.