“Food, Inc.” – you won’t look at food the same way again

With the release of Michael Jackson’s documentary today, it presented an opportune time to mention one of the best documentaries from the past year that I had the chance to finally see last week: “Food, Inc.” I’ll warn you in advance – this movie will open your eyes the quality of the food we consume so if you feel that ignorance is bliss, don’t watch it.

“Food, Inc.” shows spotlights the handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country, and how they clearly don’t want you to realize the extent of their power. They enforce their policies and threaten reprisals against those raising crops and animals by organic and Green methods. They dictate cruel and unhealthy living conditions for animals, and place our health second to their profits as they back it all with multi-million dollar ad campaigns portraying themselves as benefactors.

The next time you cut into a nice T-bone, know that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That’s true even if you’re eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse as most of the beef in America comes from just four suppliers.

The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They’re grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They’re fattened so fast they can’t stand up or walk and their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.

Want to go up against the major food companies? Good luck. They’ll fight you in court, sometimes even suing on baseless claims, knowing they’ll lose, but also knowing it’ll send a message and scare future whistleblowers. The days of local farmers are dwindling as today’s food producers are some of the biggest corporations with major political clout. 

Remember how years ago you didn’t hear much about E. coli? Now it seems to be in the news once a month. People are even getting E. coli poisoning from spinach and lettuce for heaven’s sake, primarily due to tainted water supplies. Why are Americans getting so fat? A lot of the cause can be directly pointed and to the massive consumption of corn-based products – an ingredient in 80% of supermarket products and subsidized by our government.

I’m not here to scare you, but that’s what this film will likely do. If nothing else, hopefully it’ll open some eyes to change the way they walk the aisles of the grocery store.




This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under The Daily Muze.