Honest Meat

What I Learned From Food Inc.

After seeing King Corn, Fast Food Nation, reading Omnivore's Dilemma,  and other popular media on the dysfunctional nature of our food system, I was skeptical that I would learn much from the new movie Food Inc.  Popular media tends to dumb down subjects to the lay person's understanding, and I would hope that I know a bit more than the lay person given my 12 years working in agriculture.  I already knew that our subsidized, overabundant grain production system created the conditions for cheap confinement feeding of livestock.  That confinement feeding of livestock created the conditions for deadly pathogens such as salmonella and E.coli 0157:H7 to multiply and spread rapidly.  I knew that large slaughterhouses break down so many animals at such a fast speed that pathogens can end up in a lot of meat, contributing to a dramatic rise in the size & severity of meat recalls over the last ten years.  These large slaughterhouses treat animals and workers with nearly the same callousness, as though they are merely industrial parts that can be quickly replaced when they wear out.  I knew that the USDA and FDA are completely ineffective in preventing and controlling the spread of human pathogens from meat  and other food processors, which has lead to countless tragic deaths after contamination has already been established.  I knew that the Monsanto corporation seems to be above the law, hiring Pinkerton police to illegally enter without warrants and take samples from farmers fields and to put out of business gentleman like Moe Parr who have been helping farmers save non GMO seed for over 50 years.  I knew that there is no protection from genetic drift, when GMO genes come into your field and contaminate your seed source, making it not only illegal to now save your seeds, but also requiring that you pay royalties to the company who facilitated the contamination in the first place (imagine if an organic farmer had to pay the chemical company royalties when a neighbor's pesticide drifted into their field and coated their crops!)  There are countless other issues that this movie brought up, from the revolving door of corporate boardrooms & political offices, the cheap food conundrum in which healthy foods are expensive and health-degenerating foods are affordable, the industrialization of organics (or you might say the 'Walmartification'), and more.  I knew all of these separate problems were occurring, I had just never seen them all woven together so seamlessly as symptoms of one growing disease.  The most basic source of life, of culture, of humanity's interaction with the earth has been turned into a dehumanizing industrial process.  Food production is now calorie production.  Agriculture is now agricolonialism.  Farmers are now serfs.  

Food Fight- My Tentative Review

First let me say that there are not enough films about food, farming, or even social issues in general.  I applaud anyone who can artfully weave these narratives together in a digestible fashion for the average viewer.  Other than little cameos in big-screen movies like Field of Dreams, farming and our food system are mostly absent from popular film, even though we all eat.  I guess producers and directors think the most essential human activity is too basic to cover.  We will have to rely on documentaries with limited screenings to educate our vast nation. 

I was mailed a copy of the new documentary, Food Fight, produced by Chris Taylor and Alan Siegel, to help generate buzz for the screening tomorrow, November 8th at the Mann Chinese Theater in Hollywood, CA.  Having already read books like Ominvore's Dilemma by Michael Pollen, The United States of Arugula by David Kamp, and watched other documentaries such as King Corn, I was very familiar with the story.  In a nutshell, Food Fight starts at the supermarket, wondering how and why the food on the shelves of the store got there.  It ends talking about 'our' delicious future and how 'we' each can take personal actions and responsibility to change the food system for the better.  For me, it is the 'our' and the 'we' that I have issue with in this well-produced, pleasant-to-watch film.