Wearing Our Food
In the prehistoric ages humans used to wear clothes made of animal fur and skin, a little bit later they start to make more complicated clothes by weaving their clothes from fibers and yarn. Afterwards linen, cotton, wool and other natural fibers were also used.
In short, when humans started thinking "clothes", they were all natural, and then in the last decades, we started to give our backs to nature and make our clothes from synthetic fibers. However, we returned now back to nature, as one of the newest trends in fashion are clothes made out of MILK!!!
And yes, the early experiments to make cloth out of milk were done in the kitchen!
I have to admit, when I first heard about it, I found the idea hard to "digest", but after I listened to one of creators of this new trend, I began to "Swallow" it. The clothes made from milk are very soft and its quality is well accepted by the customers. But of course, milk clothes are expensive.
Now, my concern is not the fashion or the prices of new trends, but rather the idea of making clothes from milk.
On one hand, it is really good to resort again to nature. Also, it is a good thing to spare some water; since the cotton needs so much water to be transformed into cloth, in comparison to milk, however, milk is also needed as food!!!
On the other side, these trends of using milk to make clothes, or using strategic edible plant like wheat to make fuel will have great impact on the food market, demand and eventually food prices. As we are taking so much of our wheat to transform it to fuel and now we will be consuming our milk to make T-shirts!!!
So milk to clothes and wheat to fuel!
Sometimes I don't know what to think!!!
I hope that you wouldn't miss understand me, I think it is very good to "go green". But we could go green and test non-edible plants and see if we can make fabric or fuel out of them, or else, any thing in nature, the options are endless....but not our food...In fact, when we look around and see how it is getting difficult every season to plant our food, because of the extremely unstable weather conditions we are experiencing nowadays and how many animals die every year because of drought, makes it a little bit difficult to understand these endeavors.
Anyway...you can say that I am just thinking out loud...and you, what do you think?
Do you want to have a chance to discuss this subject with some agricultural experts, I would suggest a visit to Pretoria, South Africa between 3rd -4th September 2012 and attend the AMT SOUTH AFRICAN AGRI OUTLOOK CONFERENCE 2012.
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Image Credit: by UNIFORM Studio via Wikimedia Commons.
