How the Collective Power of Women Can Change the World (Part 1 of 3)

by Carolyn Parrs

When sleeping women wake, mountains move.

~ Chinese proverb

No sunlight. No fresh air. Enclosed in darkness to plump up in an insanely artificial way. That’s the reality for most chickens being farmed today. And if the farmers under contract with the Big Boys do not agree to raise their livestock that way, “They hold their contract over their heads,” says third generation chicken farmer, Carole Morison. She was mad as hell and just couldn’t take it anymore.

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For Leah, creativity is the cure.

As my knowledge and passion grows, I see that we, as Americans and world citizens, have a lot of work to do. To combat frustration and despair that grip many of us after we see movies like Food Inc., I have developed a platform for change. Human creativity remains to be one of the last resources that has not been commodified for profit. There are vast untapped stories, images, fears, dreams and damaged lives out there that are waiting to be expressed.

Our Facebook Page, World Food Day KC 2011 Flash Mob has many functions, but at the top of the list is: A place where we can express in different ways our concern, hope and fears around the topic of the future of food. These expressions, in turn, are then made into posters and fliers that are free for world citizens to download in order to make their own parties, potlucks, protests, flash mobs or advertisements. We encourage people who feel that they don’t have a voice to contribute, as their healing becomes our healing. The system in the U.S. and around the world is truly in a crisis of proportions that we are barely conscious of.

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Blowing the Whistle: A Conversation with Carole Morison of film, FOOD Inc. – show 15

As I was watching Carole Morison in the Oscar nominated film, Food, INC, she instantly became a personal hero of mine. “This is not farming, this is mass production like an assembly line,” she said in the film. Carole, a Perdue chicken grower, was the only farmer brave enough to allow the film crew into the chicken house for all the world to see what’s really happening — how these animals are really being bred and what we’re really eating when we sit down to our family meal with a plump, juicy, stuffed chicken. If you haven’t seen the film, I promise you, what’s happening and what we’re eating isn’t finger licking good.

As a business woman, what blew my mind is a typical grower with two chickens houses has borrowed over $500,000 and earns about $18,000 a year. Not good. I asked her in our interview, “What DIDN’T you say in the film that you really wanted to?” Carole doesn’t hold back. You’ll want to hear this for yourself!

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