Jonathan Foley: “The other Inconvenient Truth”

by | Oct 1, 2021 | Film studies

Film: Food, Inc. http://webapps1.cortland.edu/lib_channels/video_player.php?ID=SANRHLN2R0qkS_3ujGDQWw

                   Lecture: Jonathan Foley: “The other Inconvenient Truth”

Lecture:

When we ask the question, Will the World Provide?, perhaps the most fundamental resource we need to consider is food. It is something humans cannot live without. But humans can live with inadequate or unhealthful food supplies, but that leaves our health at risk.

The chapter on Food, the movie Food, Inc., and the TED talks lecture on “The Other Inconvenient Truth” provide a mixed review of future food resources for humans. On the one hand, there have been miracle developments in agriculture worldwide that has increased food supplies dramatically. These include the Green Revolution in developing countries and industrial agriculture practices in the developed countries, especially the US. On the other hand, even adequate production of food does not guarantee that poor people can afford it. After the recent economic downturn, 1.1 billion people worldwide are malnourished because they cannot afford the high price of food.

Poverty may be the most important challenge people face in the developing world in terms of eating adequate food. In the developed world, a different problem we face is that our new agricultural methods may not be sustainable in the long run. Pages 84 and 85 of your textbook suggest this dilemma: “Western agriculture basically turns fossil fuel into food.” Beef production wastes the calories available in grains. Water use for irrigation is severely challenging our water resources. And even in the developing countries, the Green Revolution (Pages 94-97) has intensified the use of fossil fuels, fertilizer, pesticides, and water.

Food, Inc. suggests that the way Americans produce food, and especially meat, is not sustainable because it is unhealthy. And the chapter on Food, in discussing “Future Food Supplies” (Pages 100-107) concludes somewhat pessimistically.

For this essay, please respond to this question (600-800 words): will there be enough food to feed everyone, everywhere, in a sustainable and healthy manner over the next fifty years?

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Dante Alighieri played a critical role in the literature world through his poem Divine Comedy that was written in the 14th century. The poem contains Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. The Inferno is a description of the nine circles of torment that are found on the earth. It depicts the realms of the people that have gone against the spiritual values and who, instead, have chosen bestial appetite, violence, or fraud and malice. The nine circles of hell are limbo, lust, gluttony, greed and wrath. Others are heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery. The purpose of this paper is to examine the Dante’s Inferno in the perspective of its portrayal of God’s image and the justification of hell. 

In this epic poem, God is portrayed as a super being guilty of multiple weaknesses including being egotistic, unjust, and hypocritical. Dante, in this poem, depicts God as being more human than divine by challenging God’s omnipotence. Additionally, the manner in which Dante describes Hell is in full contradiction to the morals of God as written in the Bible. When god arranges Hell to flatter Himself, He commits egotism, a sin that is common among human beings (Cheney, 2016). The weakness is depicted in Limbo and on the Gate of Hell where, for instance, God sends those who do not worship Him to Hell. This implies that failure to worship Him is a sin.


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God is also depicted as lacking justice in His actions thus removing the godly image. The injustice is portrayed by the manner in which the sodomites and opportunists are treated. The opportunists are subjected to banner chasing in their lives after death followed by being stung by insects and maggots. They are known to having done neither good nor bad during their lifetimes and, therefore, justice could have demanded that they be granted a neutral punishment having lived a neutral life. The sodomites are also punished unfairly by God when Brunetto Lattini is condemned to hell despite being a good leader (Babor, T. F., McGovern, T., & Robaina, K. (2017). While he commited sodomy, God chooses to ignore all the other good deeds that Brunetto did.

Finally, God is also portrayed as being hypocritical in His actions, a sin that further diminishes His godliness and makes Him more human. A case in point is when God condemns the sin of egotism and goes ahead to commit it repeatedly. Proverbs 29:23 states that “arrogance will bring your downfall, but if you are humble, you will be respected.” When Slattery condemns Dante’s human state as being weak, doubtful, and limited, he is proving God’s hypocrisy because He is also human (Verdicchio, 2015). The actions of God in Hell as portrayed by Dante are inconsistent with the Biblical literature. Both Dante and God are prone to making mistakes, something common among human beings thus making God more human.

To wrap it up, Dante portrays God is more human since He commits the same sins that humans commit: egotism, hypocrisy, and injustice. Hell is justified as being a destination for victims of the mistakes committed by God. The Hell is presented as being a totally different place as compared to what is written about it in the Bible. As a result, reading through the text gives an image of God who is prone to the very mistakes common to humans thus ripping Him off His lofty status of divine and, instead, making Him a mere human. Whether or not Dante did it intentionally is subject to debate but one thing is clear in the poem: the misconstrued notion of God is revealed to future generations.

 

References

Babor, T. F., McGovern, T., & Robaina, K. (2017). Dante’s inferno: Seven deadly sins in scientific publishing and how to avoid them. Addiction Science: A Guide for the Perplexed, 267.

Cheney, L. D. G. (2016). Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno: A Comparative Study of Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Stradano, and Federico Zuccaro. Cultural and Religious Studies, 4(8), 487.

Verdicchio, M. (2015). Irony and Desire in Dante’s” Inferno” 27. Italica, 285-297.

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