东南大学《英语三级》Part II-Viewing-script.docVIP

Script for Viewing—(Part II Unit 2) Hello. My name is Birke Baehr, and I’m 11 years old. I came here today to talk about what’s wrong with our food system. First of all I would like to say that I’m really amazed at how easily kids are led to believe all the marketing and advertising on TV, at public schools and pretty much everywhere else you look. It seems to me like corporations are always trying to get kids, like me, to get their parents to buy stuff that really isn’t good for us or the planet. Little kids, especially, are attracted by colorful packaging and plastic toys. I must admit, I used to be one of them. I also used to think that all of our food came from these happy, little farms where pigs rolled in mud and cows grazed on grass all day. What I discovered was this is not true. I began to look into this stuff on the Internet, in books and in documentary films, in my travels with my family. I discovered the dark side of the industrialized food system. First, there’s genetically engineered seeds and organisms. That is when a seed is manipulated in a laboratory to do something not intended by nature---like taking the DNA of a fish and putting it into the DNA of a tomato. Yuck. Don’t get me wrong, I like fish and tomatoes, but this is just creepy. The seeds are then planted, then grow. The food they produce have been proven to cause cancer and other problems in lab animals, and people have been eating food produced this way since the 1990s. And most folks don’t even know they exist. Did you know rats that ate genetically engineered corn had developed signs of liver and kidney toxicity? These include kidney inflammation and lesions and increased kidney weight. Yet almost all the corn we eat has been altered genetically in some way. And let me tell you, corn is in everything. And don’t even get me started on the Confined Animal Feeding Operations called CAFOS. Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels that they mix with the dirt to mak