“Our Daily Bread” Shows Where Food Really Comes From

Check out this disturbing clip from the Sundance Channel documentary film “Our Daily Bread” created by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. The film takes a look at animals, slaughterhouses and factories in order to clue consumers in to what goes on behind the scenes to make our pre-packaged foods.

As the Sundance channel website states,

With dispassionate objectivity, Austrian documentary filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter lifts the veil on modern industrial food production to present a glimpse of a world few of us have ever seen – or are willing to think about. Avoiding conventional narrative techniques, Geyrhalter lets the images speak for themselves. The result is a coldly beautiful and often disturbing visual essay illustrating what goes on in slaughterhouses, manufacturing plants and large dusty fields to process and package our food.

Heap Some Home Cookin’ Onto Pig Piss Plastic Plates

Imagine enjoying a delicious meal at a friend’s home, noticing their nice dinnerware and complimenting them on it. “Oh, these? They’re made of pig urine!”

Agroplast of Denmark aims to put pig piss plates on the tables of restaurants and homes around the world. Cnet news has it:

The company has essentially devised a way to better commercialize urea, a compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, found in urine.

Other animal waste products like manure can be inserted into the system, but pig urine is particularly interesting because it is an environmental hazard, says Peter Tøttrup, a partner at Seed Capital, a Danish venture firm that also helps the government incubate start-ups. We ran into Tøttrup at the coffee urn at the NordicGreen conference in Menlo Park, Calif., this week.

“There are 20 million pigs in Denmark, and what they do environmentally is a problem,” he said.

Agroplast sees pig waste as an eco-friendly solution to the fossil-fuel-plastic dilemma. Not only can it be used in products, it eliminates the issue of disposing of the waste. Tøttrup claims that these pig waste plastics would cost less than fossil fuel plastics, but others disagree, as historically bioplastics have been more expensive. Either way, the company advocates using pig waste in fertilizers (okay, sounds about right) lotion (getting grosser) and as a “flavor enhancer in cigarettes” (um, vomit).

Link [cnet]

Photo credit: Flickr user beelden zeggen meer