Blog Report: Earth Day

This past Earth Day, my partner Julian Hanopol and I created a poster on Malnutrition. The purpose of our poster was to make people become aware of it being an increasingly dangerous and important factor in our society, and everywhere around the world. We provided statistics, habits, impacts, and solutions to this rising problem. People from the Vanier community reacted just like Julian and I did when we started researching this topic. We were all aware that obesity was a problem, often seen in the United States, but to that extent? We had no idea. What is even more breath taking is that it isn’t only the poor that are not fed correctly, but the average to wealthy families are too! Thinking they are making the child happy and doing everything it can to please them, parents tend to buy junk food for their child, because it is what they ask for. Also, families nowadays don’t have much time to spend in the kitchen, and so take the easy way out, by going to a drive-through to buy something cheap and quick, but filling for their child.

Vanier’s activities were quite spectacular. I didn’t expect that many people to take part in the event and put so much effort and enthusiasm in explaining their project. To highlight a few, I recall seeing a petition to ban plastic bottles at the college, animal abuse and mistreatment, fruits and vegetables importance, factories abusing people in third-world countries through low wages, and so on…

Many booths were extremely interesting; I must say I learned a great deal and was shocked about many different facts at various booths. The booth that brought most of my attention and greatest interest was the one where we saw animals not getting the right treatment, living with diseases, and dying at a young age for outrageous reasons. The pictures have been daunting my mind ever since. Some say we shouldn’t pay them much interest because they think that these animals are there for us to eat, but watching them suffer is unacceptable. For us meat eaters: yes, I do believe we should eat meat, but not if they are to be treated the way they are! For example, in Western society, many own dogs as a pet, but in Asia, they treat dogs the same way we treat pigs, cows, chicken here! In short, the booth provided excellent solutions to this animal slaughter; of which I will without a doubt do my best follow. I even took a recipe they handed out of amazing brownies make of ingredients having by no means traces of animal! No eggs, no butter, no milk! Seeing this, I realized it is in fact possible to reduce animal abuse by either cooking no animal ingredients as often as possible, and by buying meat, milk, butter, cheese, etc, from farms where it has been certified that the animals are well treated.