believe it - or not

When I read the article, I doubted that the scientists were able to see the differences between the two species of woodpeckers when the woodpecker is only visible for one or two seconds – and 20 m away. But I am not an ornithologist. And the video is much better than I expected it (b/c the pictures are very fuzzy), and now I can imagine that this could be enough for specialists. What partly convinced me are the comparisons made in Fig. 2 and the rejection of a "piebald"/leucistic pileated woodpecker as a result of long observations in the area where the ivory- billed woodpecker (?) was seen. However, there are still doubts. I want to believe that this species exists but do not know if I can.

We feed the world

I really enjoy reading "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." I like the thoughts, the slight irony and sentences like "How'd you get them (carrots) in there (the ground)?" (p. 12). At the same time, such sentences make me sad and I hope that Barbara Kingsolver exaggerates when she depicts the knowledge about food, where it comes from, how it grows etc. For me, this sounds unbelievable because I went to a Waldorf School where gardening/farming actually is a subject, and we all had to do a 2-weeks internship at an organic farm.
Anyway, why I started writing this post is because the first chapter (which all its facts about how much oil we need to get our food and how much food 'the world' produces) made me think of a movie I have seen a couple of years ago: "We feed the world." It is a documentary (feature length) about globalization, 'industrial progress' and its impacts on food. The Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer went to Romania, Spain, France, Brazil, Switzerland and of course Austria to see where the food comes from, visits farms and fishermen, interviews Jean Ziegler, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International. I admit that some scenes are slightly boring, but other scenes/pictures are just shocking, especially the scenes in the fattening farm (approx. last third of the film)! Honestly, I can hardly stand them (don't watch these scenes while you're eating!). All in all, this film is really thought-provoking. For further information: http://www.we-feed-the-world.at/


Since it is an Austrian film it is mostly in German (but with a strooong Austrian accent which even I can sometimes hardly understand) but there are English subtitles.