When I got back home from watching the utterly depressing documentary Food Inc., I booted up my computer to check my email, and the first headline I saw on the news site I use as my homepage, was a report on an outbreak of E. coli. The bacteria were apparently found in a sample of that vital staple of the modern American diet, chilled cookie dough. At that point, some dozen or so people were sick. I'm not sure which type of E. coli this report referred to specifically, but it seems there is a modern type of E. coli which causes internal bleeding in its victims, is often fatal and apparently didn't exist until we started pumping cattle full of corn (instead of grass or hay) to fatten them up faster. One of the film's most compelling 'stars' was a mother whose toddler died of E. coli infection after eating some hamburgers.
To be honest, Food Inc. didn't really tell me anything I didn't know already, which is why I didn't give it 10. Meat production is no longer about happy smiling farmers chewing on straws, beside their plump, warm-bodied cows in sun filled, grassy fields. Or even about Marlboro smoking cowboys riding the range on trusty steeds, to round up stray mavericks while the sun sets over the western horizon. It's about feces encrusted cattle jammed cheek by jowl into manure filled feed lots, mile after mile after smelly mile, while we pump them full of subsidized corn, growth hormones and antibiotics and process them like so many slabs of raw industrial protein. And when we do process them, (a job usually carried out by cheap immigrant labor because none of us squeamish meat eaters want to do the job) the manure randomly falls off the cattle's hides and onto the meat where it festers until we cook it – or fail to cook it – and eat it. But don't worry, soon we may have a way to make sure no nasty bacteria remain on the meat .we're going to wash it all with another chemical to kill the bugs ( I forget but was that REALLY caustic soda - sodium hydroxide? - Lovely eh?)
Food Inc. doesn't just look at beef production, although that's probably the most compelling part of the film, because watching a mother try to recover from the death-by-food-poisoning of her toddler, by turning into Erin Brokovich and taking on the might of the food industry AND the government, is fairly riveting stuff. Food Inc. also looks at the chicken industry, GMO soy beans, and the ludicrous subsidies that have made nutritionally poor fast food far, far cheaper than anything remotely healthy. Like fruit and veg, whole grains or humanely produced meat. And not only that, the subsidies have underwritten the cost of grain exports (via NAFTA) to the extent that producers in developing countries can no longer compete in their home markets, putting farmers in places like Mexico out of work. So what do they do? They migrate – often illegally – to the USA to work in meat processing plants.
And if you are a farmer trying to grow non GMO soy beans – or any crop really – please don't be silly enough to do it anywhere downwind of a GMO field, because if stray pollen happens to land in your field, and the mighty seed company finds evidence of their genes on your patch of ground, boy are you in trouble. Quite how you keep your crop GMO free under these circumstances is beyond me. But should anyone out there want non GMO food – well we can always import it from another country. And we do. Meanwhile Big Seed is putting out of business a centuries old small industrial practice that helps farmers save seed from year to year. If this were happening overseas, we would call it fascism.
And in this manner, following individual cases, Michael Pollan (author of the excellent Omnivore's Dilemma) and maker of Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser, show us how food production has strayed from being about producing, well, food, and has become a huge industrial operation controlled by a frighteningly small number of big businesses. Never mind Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the Military Industrial Complex. Why did no one warn us about the Agricultural Industrial Complex? The European Union's past obsession with industrializing food production is at least understandable given the horrendous WW2 shortages which led to rationing which continued for years after the war. But when did America ever have rationing? Truly a frightening and depressing movie. I'm a lucky middle class person. I have a garden where I grow veggies and I can afford to buy organic eggs and meat. I know not everyone can. But there must be some way to break this ludicrous vicious circle. When we see the people who are now existing on fast food use money they could – and should – be spending on fruit and veg to instead pay for their prescription drugs to treat the diseases they get – from eating fast food – something snaps in my head and I wonder if the whole world is totally and utterly bonkers? And on it goes.
But, as the small scale organic farmer said as he processed some home grown chickens and pigs through his family run business (where people come to buy genuinely farm raised, grass fed meat after a 3 or 4 hour drive), "Don't say you can't afford $3 a dozen for organic eggs when you're standing there with a 75c can of coke in your hands .." Exactly. Eat less – mostly greens as Michael Pollan (approximately) says.
To be honest, Food Inc. didn't really tell me anything I didn't know already, which is why I didn't give it 10. Meat production is no longer about happy smiling farmers chewing on straws, beside their plump, warm-bodied cows in sun filled, grassy fields. Or even about Marlboro smoking cowboys riding the range on trusty steeds, to round up stray mavericks while the sun sets over the western horizon. It's about feces encrusted cattle jammed cheek by jowl into manure filled feed lots, mile after mile after smelly mile, while we pump them full of subsidized corn, growth hormones and antibiotics and process them like so many slabs of raw industrial protein. And when we do process them, (a job usually carried out by cheap immigrant labor because none of us squeamish meat eaters want to do the job) the manure randomly falls off the cattle's hides and onto the meat where it festers until we cook it – or fail to cook it – and eat it. But don't worry, soon we may have a way to make sure no nasty bacteria remain on the meat .we're going to wash it all with another chemical to kill the bugs ( I forget but was that REALLY caustic soda - sodium hydroxide? - Lovely eh?)
Food Inc. doesn't just look at beef production, although that's probably the most compelling part of the film, because watching a mother try to recover from the death-by-food-poisoning of her toddler, by turning into Erin Brokovich and taking on the might of the food industry AND the government, is fairly riveting stuff. Food Inc. also looks at the chicken industry, GMO soy beans, and the ludicrous subsidies that have made nutritionally poor fast food far, far cheaper than anything remotely healthy. Like fruit and veg, whole grains or humanely produced meat. And not only that, the subsidies have underwritten the cost of grain exports (via NAFTA) to the extent that producers in developing countries can no longer compete in their home markets, putting farmers in places like Mexico out of work. So what do they do? They migrate – often illegally – to the USA to work in meat processing plants.
And if you are a farmer trying to grow non GMO soy beans – or any crop really – please don't be silly enough to do it anywhere downwind of a GMO field, because if stray pollen happens to land in your field, and the mighty seed company finds evidence of their genes on your patch of ground, boy are you in trouble. Quite how you keep your crop GMO free under these circumstances is beyond me. But should anyone out there want non GMO food – well we can always import it from another country. And we do. Meanwhile Big Seed is putting out of business a centuries old small industrial practice that helps farmers save seed from year to year. If this were happening overseas, we would call it fascism.
And in this manner, following individual cases, Michael Pollan (author of the excellent Omnivore's Dilemma) and maker of Fast Food Nation Eric Schlosser, show us how food production has strayed from being about producing, well, food, and has become a huge industrial operation controlled by a frighteningly small number of big businesses. Never mind Eisenhower's 1961 warning about the Military Industrial Complex. Why did no one warn us about the Agricultural Industrial Complex? The European Union's past obsession with industrializing food production is at least understandable given the horrendous WW2 shortages which led to rationing which continued for years after the war. But when did America ever have rationing? Truly a frightening and depressing movie. I'm a lucky middle class person. I have a garden where I grow veggies and I can afford to buy organic eggs and meat. I know not everyone can. But there must be some way to break this ludicrous vicious circle. When we see the people who are now existing on fast food use money they could – and should – be spending on fruit and veg to instead pay for their prescription drugs to treat the diseases they get – from eating fast food – something snaps in my head and I wonder if the whole world is totally and utterly bonkers? And on it goes.
But, as the small scale organic farmer said as he processed some home grown chickens and pigs through his family run business (where people come to buy genuinely farm raised, grass fed meat after a 3 or 4 hour drive), "Don't say you can't afford $3 a dozen for organic eggs when you're standing there with a 75c can of coke in your hands .." Exactly. Eat less – mostly greens as Michael Pollan (approximately) says.