Food, Inc.

Food, Inc. is an excellent movie documenting the industrial food system.  Although I am aware of the many horror stories about how chicken companies inject their food with growth hormones for size, water and chemicals before packaging for plumpness, and colors for a “pretty chicken look”, I still have a hard time stomaching (pun intended) what we actually eat. 

Before watching this movie I have to admit I was unaware of the complete biochemical makeover that corn has undergone.  Why are we feeding fish, such as tilapia and salmon, corn? That is not right.  That means we are using cheap grain (corn) to feed animals in concentrated animal feeding operations.  Cattle are meant to eat grass, but corn makes animals fat, and we are eating these animals. 

Food, Inc. discusses the outbreak of e coli because the cows produce more e coli due to eating an unnatural diet of corn, the e coli not only gets into our meat supply but the runoff of manure from factory farms gets into spinach and other vegetables.  Bad pathogens get spread “far and wide”.  One hamburger patty contains pieces of meat from thousand of cows due to the slaughtering process.  The movie goes on to discuss societal repercussions of eating overly processed foods including meats, vegetables, and simple carbohydrates which are the obesity epidemic, deaths by food poisoning, the onset of diabetes, and the ecological health of the whole food system. 

Big corporations have a social responsibility with regard to this issue.  I was glad to see that Wal-Mart is jumping on board with the organic movement (according to the film).  They noted that one million dollar purchase order from Wal-Mart results in tons of pesticides not entering our food and ecological system.  Also, perhaps they can contribute to the economic gap in the cost of organic foods with foods riddled with pesticides.  However, Monsanto is coming across, in this movie, as sort of a bad-guy because of their “no public seed policy”.  This basically means they own their genetically altered seeds and even if their seeds accidently cross pollinate with a farmer’s crops that uses organic seeds, Monsanto claims a patent violation and prosecutes the farmers.  They actually sue the farmers in a fashion that discourages independent farmers. 

Personally, I pretty much cook with organic ground buffalo meat instead of ground beef and I know we are lucky to have that meat in our grocery store.  This is partially due to our location being in Colorado where buffalo are prevalent.  However, I fear that soon this meat will too become common place, fed corn, over processed, and will be the same as just regular hamburger.  I hope not.  I am going to express my opinion with my wallet.