For my final Food For Thought Action Project of the year, my assignment was to create a mural, artfully depicting the gradual change from the ways of past agriculture, to how I picture it to look in the future, if things took a turn for the better. The purpose of this project was to gather enough knowledge to be able to create a realistic mural with four “panels”, complete with a vision for the future. I learned a lot about the history of food on our planet during this unit, and especially while creating this picture. If I had the power to design my own food system just for America, I would have each couple blocks of people make their own biointensive garden. Biointensive farming is an eco friendly type of farming that creates healthier plants using less of everything normally used in farming, including space. Everyone would chip in and grow what they needed, and there would be no need to import, what with the balanced diet biointensive farming provides.
Time by LF
In this narrative, I will talk more about the steps I took to create my mural, and explain the reasoning why I split it into four panels, while also trying to make it flow. The most difficult part for me to draw, were the center two panels which show where we are now, and where we were a few years ago. Planning my murel was a long process full of thought. First, I decided to choose three words to focus on for each of the four panels I was going to draw. I used these words to help guide my research and to give me ideas for what to draw. After I had it all planned out, I felt comfortable enough to begin drawing. In my picture, I drew a large tree on the left to show nature and mother earth, and I depict the hunter/gatherer age and the main word I focused on was Life. For my second pannal, Death, I wanted to show how meat was being killed a new way, instead of by hunters. I drew a meat processing factory in the distance to show that it is not being taken care of properly, and I used roads to go from year to year. In the third panel, Decay, I wanted to show how monoculture was becoming a big problem because it is killing plants. I drew fields of the same crop, spreading as far as the eye can see. The Walmart sign shows how big businesses are taking over. Finally for my future panel where I focused on Birth, I showed three different ways that I like to imagine one can “birth” a new way of feeding the world. I focused on change, health, biointensive farming, rooftop gardens, solar panels, and having your own meat and animals. I hope that in the future, I can inspire others, who will also inspire even more people, to create their own food system. Hopefully, my mural shows each of these steps and gives a view into a better future in an artistic way.