In order to raise awareness about the issues surrounding the global food trade, our group chose to screen a documentary for anyone that wanted to attend. The documentary we chose to show for our even was Erwin Wagenhofer’s 2005 documentary, We Feed the World, which focuses on the impacts of the industrial production of food and factory farming. Furthermore, our group ultimately decided to host a group discussion after the documentary about the issues covered in the film. Our overall goal was to make people feel as if they could do something meaningful with the massive amount of negative information we were about to fill them with regarding the global food trade and unjust international policies involved in the agricultural industry.
While the task of simply showing a film seemed extremely easy at first, our group rapidly discovered that it was a much more complicated task than anticipated. Originally, we struggled with how to orchestrate meeting times. After we got passed the initial planning hardships, our first two plans for the group projects fell through. Logistical errors occurred as well, such as not being able to solidify room reservations for a decent portion of the time we were planning the event, and our flyers were unable to be printed to meet the deadline we set for ourselves. Beyond the planning issues, we also struggled with connecting to the larger audience that we wanted to. We originally created a Facebook event that allowed us to invite our friends, and for our friends to invite their friends. Including the five of us, we ended up with a solid nine people that agreed to attend our event through our Facebook invitation. We also decided we would table for our event and talk to people about the issues we wanted to address outside of the HUB on campus. Ultimately, we learned quickly that most people were not interested in what we had to say.
Despite our failures, we were able to successfully pull off an event that we were all proud of. I was most proud of the fact that we were able to educate the people we spoke to about the hardships being faced by developing nations through developed nations “dumping” their surplus of food into developing nations markets, as taught about throughout the course. Ultimately, it taught me that in order to make change on a global level, we need to mobilize on a local level first.
Savannah, my group had difficulty coordinating our event as well. So it goes with organizing political events for educational purposes. The biggest takeaway I came out with, however, is that an event like this action project gives us the skills to bring awareness to regular citizens about these crucial topics surrounding food. I commend you for wanting to make a change on the global level, and it will take many more of us with the same mindset to create positive action! Well done!