What exactly is a Ben Franklin exercise?  See the instructions for it on the exercise page.  These exercises are a lot of work, but allow you to really take command of your pronunciation!!

Video Text:

The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.  But, the image that's used to sell the food - it is still the imagery of agrarian America.  You go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers.  The picket fence, and the silo and the 30's farmhouse, and the green grass.  It's the spinning of this pastoral fantasy.  The modern American supermarket has on average 47,000 products.

There are no seasons in the American supermarket; now there are tomatoes all year 'round:  grown half way around the world, picked when it was green, and ripened with ethylene gas.  Although it looks like a tomato, it's kind of a notional tomato.  I mean, it's the idea of a tomato.  In the meat aisle, there are no bones anymore.  There is this deliberate veil, this curtain, that's dropped between us and where our food is coming from.  The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you're eating.  Because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.

If you follow the food chain back from those shrink-wrapped packages of meat, you find a very different reality.  The reality is a factory.  It's not a farm, it's a factory.  That meat is being processed by huge multi-national corporations that have very little to do with ranches and farmers.  Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where the animals and the workers are being abused.

And the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are being deliberately hidden from us.  You've got a small group of national corporations who control the entire food system from seed to the supermarket.  They are gaining control of food.  This isn't just about what we're eating, this is about what we're allowed to say.  What we're allowed to know.  It's not just our health that's at risk.  The companies don't want farmers talking.  They don't want this story told.