If you haven’t already seen the movie Food Inc, I beg of you to Netflix immediately. This film, although rather young, is considered a classic and should be watched by anyone who well, eats. The film discusses slaughterhouses, environmental issues caused by our food systems, food contamination/safety, the mistreatment of immigrant workers, expensive healthy food, and the absolutely mind boggling story that is the history of Monsanto. It is so much more than a few hours of cow killing footage to scare you into never eating meat again. It is smart, well written, and encourages consumers to be knowledgeable on what they are eating, and to be aware of just how powerful their purchases are. I push this movie onto anyone who will listen, because I believe in its message so strongly.
As an already current vegetarian, I don’t need to see cows being slaughtered to convince me of my dietary choice. However, my reason for being a vegetarian is not because I think humans are not meant to consume meat. It is, as the film will show you the American system of producing beef, poultry and fish that keeps my plate looking the way it is: meatless. Author Michael Pollan is a commentator in the film and brings to our attention how we walk through the aisles of the grocery store seeing pictures of farmers, pastures, and 1930’s barns on our food packaging. But this advertisement is just that, an advertisement. Because our meat and dairy is not coming from a farm anymore, it is coming from a factory. In fact, it is coming from about 13 factories. Yep. In our whole nation, we only have 13 slaughterhouses now providing us our meat. Billions of pounds coming out of 13 doors, picture it. There is no man with a straw hat calling cows in from a day in the grass. Four companies control over 80% of the market. And with science and technology, factory farms are now mass producing our food even if it means cutting back in other areas such as safety and quality. Here is a scary part of the movie summed up for you: when E. Coli broke out in our meat, and people started dying, rather than improve our quality assurance (E.Coli spreads between cows mostly through feces, which since the cows are kept so close to one another in unsanitary conditions, is an easy situation to arise), food science gave us meat “fillers” with ammonia in them. Meat fillers would be combined with our ground beef, the ammonia would kill any e.coli, and now we don’t have to worry about the bacteria anymore. We can keep the cows standing in their own fecal matter, and voila, we even have a new product to bring in revenue.
I am a firm believer in”you are what you eat”. If you eat a depressed cow, you are eating depressed beef, and therefore will not feel as wonderful as someone who is eating a happy bird, or better yet a plate of organic leafy greens that the sun fed. My first thought while watching the film is “why so greedy? Why can’t we just have more small individual farms, more grass grazing animals, and less of a psycho production goal?” It is a reminder that business and food are two separate teams, and nowhere in the rule book under profits does it say “just make sure to not make too much; it is unhealthy, glutinous, not sustainable and morally wrong”.
You will also learn about some of these factories recruiting workers in Mexico, and bringing them into our country, illegally. Here in the states, immigrant workers take these jobs at below minimum wage, in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. To avoid a police raid, bad press, and the chance of outsiders seeing the inside; factory bosses submit small lists to the police on a routine basis, and workers are arrested in their homes and deported back to their country. Workers are easily replaced since they are on assembly lines and not given more than one simple responsibility to do over and over again. In exchange for these arrests, the police look the other way and never raid a factory, where we can imagine they are well aware of the illegal working situation that is present. The food companies know well who they are hiring; they put a huge effort into recruiting these workers themselves. While watching this portion of the film, one cannot help but think it seems as if our American dream is built on the sacrifice of others.
Author Marion Nestle (professor at NYU, author of Food Politics, Safe Food, and What to Eat) writes about just how political our food system is, and Food Inc touches on this as well. We learn of Montsanto (the seed company which owns 90% of our nations soy beans) VIP’s moving on in their career to occupy positions in the FDA (Food and Drug Administration responsible for many policies, and plays a large role in food safety), and becoming Supreme Court judges. The exchange in positions may be considered a conflict of interest to you, and it should be. I wonder how this hasn’t been figured out sooner. We rely on our FDA and USDA to protect us, but we have no idea who the faces of these organizations are. If the people who are hired to protect us have roots with the companies who have capitalized our food system, how honest are our policies? We may live in a seemingly democratic country, but we do not have a democratic food system.
The main message is that there is a huge effort in keeping consumer information low, and profits high in the food business. As Eric Schlosser (author of Fast Food Nation) says “they know that if you knew, you might not want to buy it”. It is all about the sale. Quite honestly, our food system is frightening, and everyone needs to know about it. We have a small number of people controlling a gigantic industry, and we aren’t talking about companies who produce toy sail boats for kids; we are talking about our food. This is what we eat; this affects our life span, our health, and therefore our medical bills and healthcare needs. So it is financial. This system affects our soil, our one planet earth with our always growing human population. So it is environmental. And the system we have now is not sustainable. This should be priority, and yet the power is shifted so strikingly to one side. Ultimately, it will fail. It may not be in my lifetime, but we know it will fail.
What I love about the film is that it does not leave us with the tragic conclusion I just drew upon, America as a developing country low on nature made food and water. Instead, just like a new business draws a business plan with proof of success in other markets, our cast reminds us to look at tobacco and how a once ruling product was eventually dethroned. We cannot sit at the dinner table with our children knowing that they are eating food products rather than simply food, or worse, meat fillers. We vote with each purchase in the food store, and we haven’t lost the war yet. Be knowledgeable about where your food comes from, and your business will eventually make change happen.
Below is the trailer for food inc, so you can get a feel for it and be motivated enough (if my writing didn’t do it for you today) to go out and rent it. Also, I highly recommend all the books mentioned in this blog, as the authors mentioned are all insanely intelligent people in the food world, and certainly the kind of people I aspire to be like one day. They are my heroes.
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