If you eat food in America, see "Food, Inc."
The 90-minute documentary will disgust, infuriate, and inspire you. Multinational food conglomerates, with the help of their cronies in government, have spent millions of dollars to make sure the average consumer never learns the things you learn in this film.*
As we watched pigs being roughly herded to their deaths in the nation’s largest slaughterhouse, I turned to Andrea. “So, will you join me? Twice a month and only if you know where it’s from?”
Without missing a beat, she said: “Oh, I made that decision back at the chickens” — the first segment of the film.
The movie has its flaws — as Ezra Klein put it, “It’s driven less by a thesis than by an intuition: Something is wrong with our food production system. It’s just not clear what.” — and you may feel powerless and hopeless by the end.
I think the best take-away is this: you vote for what kind of food industry you want three times a day. Consumers can change the system. You don’t need to give up industrially-produced meat and poultry full-stop, as I have, but you can significantly reduce, as Marco has. Try food writer Mark Bittman’s “Vegan Before 6” strategy or his “lessmeatism” philosophy. Whatever works for you, do it. But, please: reduce your consumption of industrially-produced meat and poultry (and corn-fed, farmed fish, while we’re at it).
Sadly, most non-meat foods are not much better, because they’re produced with corn- and soy-based chemicals and genetically-modified organisms, and travels thousands of petro-miles to your door. You know the drill: whenever you can, avoid packaged foods, especially ones with ingredients you don’t recognize, and eat what’s grown locally. (Here’s a guide.)
Alright, enough with the soapbox. I want to end with three images from the film that have stuck with me:
- A chicken farmer in Kentucky, contracted (and indebted) to Tyson. Driving around in his pickup, he’s overweight, red-faced, jowly, and unhealthy-looking. His chickens are stuffed into huge buildings with black curtains over the windows which Tyson doesn’t allow the film crew to enter.
- In contrast: Joel Slatin, the infamous “grass farmer” of Polyface Farm. If you got rid of his funky eyeglasses, he’d be a farmer from central cating: tan, fit, muscular, and at ease as he walks his land, drives a tractor, and butchers a chicken. His animals are the platonic ideal, the image most Americans still have when they think “cow” — grazing on grass, nuzzling one another, basking in sunlight (this is not what the vast majority of cows in this country do every day). The irony is that Slatin is the black sheep and the quiet revolutionary that undermines the dominance of the angro-industrial approach.
- A machine spewing out slabs of a putty-colored, SPAM-like substance that is destined to be added to 70% of fast food hamburgers in America. It’s a meat filler “cleansed” with ammonia to combat traces of deadly E. Coli found in industrially-produced beef. That’s right: you are essentially eating bleach.
* Most of which is not news to anyone who’s read Michael Pollan and Eric Schloesser, but seeing bald corruption and abuse of people and animals on the big screen makes it all the more real.
PS: I just got the film’s companion book in the mail, which includes essays from Pollan, Schloesser, food policy maven Marion Nestle, and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, among others, so I’ll report back on what I learn.
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