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It's amazing, really, that people think they can over-consume in an ecologically-friendly way. The term "Green" has become the new trendy corporate profit-making phrase; the magic words which marketers can attach to anything to artificially inflate the price. "Green" does not mean ecologically friendly. Leaders talk about the "greening" of the economy, but it is actually the greenwashing of the economy; fundamentally, the ecocidal economy stays the same.

The Thanksgiving holiday is a glorification and celebration of, at least secondarily, gluttony. Gluttony and overconsumption are synonymous. One cannot overconsume in a sustainable way; they are concepts in opposition.

I would imagine the changes needed to make the Thanksgiving holiday sustainable or ecologically friendly would be in opposition to any of the corporate forces labeling the products of the linear process of industrial manufacturing as "Green."

This is not to say that people should not try to live their lives in an ecologically friendly manner; quite the contrary. The point I'm trying to make is that the best way to have a less environmentally harmful Thanksgiving, assuming you have to celebrate it at all, is not by buying organic salad dressing and a tofurkey, but by cutting the corporations and their food out of the meal completely, or as much as possible.

Not just at Thanksgiving but all year round, buy locally, do not buy food from the grocery store. Any turkey you buy from the grocery store is factory farmed, it does not matter if it is "organic" or "cage free" or any of that. All factory farmed turkeys are cage free, they are packed in by the thousands on the bottom of a big building where they have no room to stretch or run anyway, despite being "cage free." Anything that comes from a grocery store, even a supposedly "Green" chain like Whole Foods, is factory farmed. That includes all food groups, meat, vegetables, fruit, eggs, dairy; everything. Everything in those stores has to be factory farmed in order to be available.

Tofu, is made from soybeans. Contrary to popular belief soybeans and soy products are not environmentally friendly and not healthy either. Most soybeans you'll find are the result of the Amazon rainforest in South America being slashed and burned so that farmers can clear the space for fields of Monsanto's Round-Up Ready Soybeans, which of course are genetically modified to tolerate the Round-up herbicide that kills everything else. In addition to that, soy wasn't even considered a food in the western world until the 20th century when we were able to really start processing it. The daily amounts consumed in asian countries where life expectancies are long are much, much lower than American diets. Soy is a phytoestrogen, and gives similar health effects to Birth Control medications; which are also phytoestrogens. They are dangerous to the health of members of both sexes.

Did you know that food that is labelled organic in grocery stores with the USDA certification often has MSG in it labeled under less well-known names? If not then take a look at www.truthinlabeling.org for more information.

The best thing we can do not just around Thanksgiving but all the time is to purchase nothing from the grocery store. We need to hunt and gather as much of our own food as possible, and what we can't hunt and gather needs to come from local farmers or other local community members. It will be much better for our health, and much better for the environment than following along blindly in the trendy and aesthetic corporate greenwashing of the fundamentally unchanged environmentally destructive industrial economy.

Learn more about this author, Matthew Tyler Funk.
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