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Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Kills His Own Food
Mark Zuckerberg is making waves lately. He was named TIME magazine person of the year and he has managed to create, in the span of seven years, a social network that transverses the entire globe. It is said that if Facebook was a country it would be third largest only behind China and India. He's had a movie based on his life that has won numerous awards.
His name is pretty much eponymous with social networking and Facebook has revolutionized the way we communicate through the internet. Facebook was primarily created, to connect people. This may be stating the obvious but when you think about internet communications before and after the phenomenon you know that this little piece of blue changed virtual as we knew it.
Zuckerberg recently announced in Fortune that he will only eat what he kills as part of his personal challenge. Earlier this month he posted "I just killed a pig and a goat" as his status message which immediately drew a barrage on comments.
He later elaborated that since he began killing his food, "I'm eating a lot healthier foods. And I've learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals. It's easy to take the food we eat for granted when we can eat good things every day." Since he started this personal challenge he says that he has actually been eating less meat.
Michael Pollan in the last part of his ground-breaking best-seller 'Omnivore's Dilemma' talked about hunting his own wild boar. He also talked about killing a chicken and why he thinks that every person who eats meat should experience killing their food at least once. I understand that logic. It immediately puts you in touch with your food. You become aware that you are part of the food web and are not just a consumer that eats something that comes neatly packaged in a supermarket aisle.
Back to Zuckerberg. Can he do for meat consumption what he's done for internet communications? It is impossible to say after just one announcement about his eating philosophy. However the fact that he is learning about sustainable food production and making an effort to learn more about where his food comes from is a commendable effort. Part of the reason why food supply chains are so skewed is that consumers do not realize the limits of a natural system or indeed, our own bodies.
Perhaps Facebook and its founder can teach us to eat healthier just like it taught us to communicate differently.
Akhila is the Founding Director of GreenDen Consultancy which is dedicated to offering business analysis, reporting and marketing solutions powered by sustainability and social responsibility. Based in the US, Europe, and India, the GreenDen's consultants share the best practices and innovation from around the globe to achieve real results. She has previously written about CSR and ethical consumption for Justmeans and hopes to put a fresh spin on things for this column. As an IEMA certified CSR practitioner, she hopes to highlight a new way of doing business. She believes that consumers have the immense power to change 'business as usual' through their choices. She is a Graduate in Molecular Biology from the University of Glasgow, UK and in Environmental Management and Law. In her free-time she is a voracious reader and enjoys photography, yoga, travelling and the great outdoors. She can be contacted via Twitter @aksvi and also http://www.thegreenden.net
