Buy locally, think globally…and watch Food, Inc. The messages in this film certainly make it worthy of being part of this trifecta of a motto. As the price of food is rapidly rising and the same food’s nutritional value is decreasing, the release of this feature-length documentary film in theaters and on DVD could not come at a better time to enlighten us with facts that corporate interests and politics have kept from the general public.
Food, Inc. exposes areas of the food industry deliberately hidden – from the seed to the supermarket – because if we knew the truth, we may not have shopped at supermarkets quite as happily. This documentary examines all parts of the food chain from the seed to the farmer and then the consumer. Some of the provocative subjects covered include the exploitation of undocumented workers who labor under inhumane conditions in farms, factories and slaughterhouses; the heartbreaking headline news story of two-and-a-half-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk who went from healthy to dead in twelve days after eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger from Jack in the Box; the deplorable conditions of animals in large-scale factor farms; and the transition from seed ownership by the public domain to the ability of corporations to patent and own seed stock. It explores the affects of engineered and genetically modified ‘food’ as well as contaminations and recalls.
The film goes back for seconds by revealing the truth about the touchy subjects like the unethical use of commodity crops, the tyranny of mass-produced foods and the biggest predictor of obesity and poor health – income level. Food, Inc offers a manifesto of empowerment: If we know the truth, we know how to vote with our dollar during every breakfast, lunch and dinner.
In the 1900s they had Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle; in the 2000s, we have Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. It’s one of this year’s nominees for an Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature. Help yourself, help the planet and watch this film. foodincmovie.com
––Reviewed by Vanessa Harris
Devotion is the book chosen by Exhale Co-founder and CEO Annabeth Eschbach to launch the Exhale Readers’ Community, and for good reason. Dani Shapiro’s poetic and moving memoir is both ordinary and transcendent; the kind of story those of us who roll out our Yoga mats can relate to on every page. This juxtaposition of the ordinary and the transcendent in one woman’s quest for devotion, struggle in a search for meaning, negotiating how she understands daily life – this blending allows her story to be both personal and universal.
We follow Shapiro’s self-inquiry in an immediate fashion; she writes is as she is living it. So we feel her story viscerally. We feel the opening of the narrative, a session with a healer, which introduces us to Shapiro, her relationships with herself, multiple generations of her family and with her faith. We relate to her confusion and her questions as we follow her circular journey through the present and the past and back to the present, through life and death to come to terms with reaching for what is always just beyond arm’s length.
Her questions arise as they do for many of us, with the unexplained fear that lies beneath the trappings of an ordinary life. On her journey, Shapiro investigates the Orthodox Judaism of her family of origin, her time on the Yoga mat, her practice of metta and other Buddhist practices of meditation.
Throughout Devotion, the gorgeous prose captures the spirit of her query, in a way that often brought me to tears. I loved the following passage. “After all, some of my greatest moments of clarity, those little eureka moments of truth – had happened in unlikely places: wheeling a cart down a supermarket aisle, driving along an empty stretch of highway, lying in bed next to Jacob as he drifted off to sleep. And I knew from my yoga practice that those insights are already fully formed – they’re literally inside our bodies, if only we know where to look.”
–– Reviewed by Felicia M. Tomasko
IT’S NO SECRET.
Oh, we may subscribe to the idea that thoughts are powerful, can alter matter and change the future. But mostly we remain the victim of the materialist mindset we were born into. So ingrained are our personal and cultural mythologies that, take away the latest pithy book of secrets or seven-step list, back-sliding into our well-wired fight or flight program becomes, quite literally, second nature.
The roots of this mindset go deep. To dig them out and truly connect with an invisible field – on a lasting and day-to-day basis – you’ve got to get your hands dirty and rework the vein of humanity’s history as if it were your own (it is your own). And that’s what this book helps you do.
In Spontaneous Evolution, Bruce Lipton, Publishingcell biologist, leading voice in body/mind science and author of The Biology of Belief has teamed up with Steve Bhaerman, writer, humorist and, as Swami Beyondananda, performance artist. The two have created what is essentially a courtroom drama of the highest – and lightest – order. It is full of detective work and word play, insight and research. It is a story that charts the evolutionary course of the belief systems we’ve created over the past 5,000 years – and reveals how they in turn have created us.
Using the science of fractals and what we now know about evolution (as opposed to what Darwin postulated many years ago) certain extrapolations and predictions can be made related to where we are at and where we’re headed. The bottom line is, as chaotic as things may be right now, there is a method to the madness and we are indeed heading forward. The whole world may, in fact, be on a path, thanks to our founding fathers, with a very American footprint. The wisdom of spiritual traditions so abundant here, the deism of our founders, as well as our history of interactions with Native Americans helped to create a government and a character, which at least in its original form, could be the next step in global evolution of consciousness.
Lipton and Bhaerman, like Penn and Teller on a metaphysical stage, deliver a story that marches backwards though four versions of civilization – animism, polytheism, monotheism and scientific materialism – into what the authors propose will be the activation of a coherent world-wide healing field in our time.
If you’re one of the many people who need more than a post-it note to remember what we’re here for, if the logical thinking brain is, for you, an actual organ of transformation capable of delivering you into an acceptable realm of spirit and faith, you will find this book a Pilgrim’s Progress of the invisible world – and a necessary companion on our collective journey toward radical healing and a positive future.
–– Reviewed by Bob Belinoff, who is an integrated health writer and filmmaker. Visit: publichealthzoom.com or reach him at: bob@digitalwkshop.com
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By Vanessa Harris, Felicia M. Tomasko & Bob Belinoff
