Changing the Blog

Well eating locally was a pretty short lived idea. I just couldn't find the money to do it. As a college student I would have to eat all of my food from outside of my meal plan which is just not doable for me right now, so starting tomorrow I will be eating no packaged foods that would go bad or be thrown away if nobody ate them. Working in the UC I happen to know which foods get thrown away everyday when nobody eats them so that part shouldn't be too hard. Eating foods with no packaging though is very important though because where do these packages go? Landfills. That's terrible! Also a lot of money goes into creating this packaging, which also adds to pollution. Excessive packaging is something we could do without.

I will be relating all of this to Low Impact Man, especially drawing parallels between my experiences with his, and some of the roadblock that I am sure I will face as well. I will also use Food Inc especially when talking about the economics of packaging, and how unpackaged goods tend to be more expensive making it harder for poor people to get a hold of. Also I would like to explore the idea of every purchase being a vote much like towards the end of Food Inc. A third text I will probably use is probably going to be Merchants of Cool, and I will talk about how people make their packaging their brands, and how we are basically paying money for the "cool" packaging, even though name brands may not actually be better foods.

This relates well to Planet and Profit. Packaging has obvious impacts on environment not only in the huge amounts of waste it produces, but also in its production. The profit comes into wide adding an extra cost to a product, that in no way enhances the product is justified in a business model. The obvious answer is that it attracts costumers, while impacting the environment does not lead to an immediate loss of profits, but why is this true? hopefully I can explore this through reflection and careful research.


I may run into a few roadblocks. The first being taste. I pretty much only eat packaged goods at the moment because I hadn't really put much thought into it until now, so I ate what tasted good. I have a feeling that I might go a bit crazy with this. Also I don't tend to think before I eat things so I may end up just doing it absent-mindedly. I will be doing this for about three weeks ending on November 21st, and starting November 3rd. I will research every Thursday and Friday. I will reflect every other day. Good Night!