Food, Inc.

Last night, I watched a great documentary called Food, Inc. that I urge you to all go see. Here is the website where you can watch the trailer and type in your zip code to find out if it's playing around you. And if it's not, ask your local theater to show it!

Here are some highlights from the film:

Corn:

• " Our grocery stores display the illusion of diversity, but really it is only a few companies using a few ingredients. Most of our “food” is simply clever rearrangements of corn."
• "30% of the land of the U.S. is used to grow corn because the government pays farmers to overproduce corn. We’re even forcing fish to eat corn. This cheap corn allowed cheap meat. So the prices of junk food and meat are artificially low because of these corn subsidies."
• "Feeding corn to cows causes E.coli to grow in their stomachs. Even giving cows 5 days of eating grass will allow them to shed 80% of their E.coli, but this never happens."
• "Many people have died from food contamination, but our government does nothing because nearly everyone who works for either the FDA or the USDA has ties to either the beef industry, the dairy industry, or Monsanto. In 1976, the FDA conducted 50,000 food inspections. In 2000, they conducted 5,000."

Workers:

• "A typical grower for Tyson, Perdue, or any of the other big 4 growers is forced to borrow $500,000 (or risk losing their contract) and earns $18,000 a year."
• Smithfield Farms (the cause of the latest swine flu outbreak) and other various multinational meat production companies pay their workers so little that they cannot afford to hire citizens of the U.S. So, they advertise in Mexico and arrange for buses to transport people across the border. Smithfield has an agreement with Immigration Services that immigration officers will turn a blind eye as the workers come across in the buses, but that they can arrest a few of their workers a day and send them back to Mexico, sometimes after people have been living and working there for 15 years. This way, the meat production is not disrupted and Immigration looks like they're doing their job. But of course none of the higher-ups at these companies ever get in trouble for hiring illegal immigrants. Only the workers, who work one of the most disgusting, most dangerous jobs in the world."
  

Health:

• "Tomatoes are picked when they are green, shipped from far, far away, and then ripened with ethylene gas. So although it looks like a tomato, it’s really just the notion of a tomato. "
• "Engineering foods is designed to push our evolutionary buttons: We have evolved to search for sugar, salt, and fat because they’re rare in nature."
• "1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will develop early onset diabetes. For minorities, this number jumps to 1 in 2."
• "We have “redesigned” chickens to have bigger breasts because people prefer white meat."

If this last statement doesn’t summarize the desire to dominate nature, the subjugation of women, the exploitation of animals, and the racism of the meat industry -- and of our society as a whole -- I don’t know what does.

But we have an incredible amount of power here. The battle against tobacco is a perfect model for how an industry’s dangerous practices can be curbed through consumer choices. (Of course, now all of those tobacco farmers are growing corn, so we need to change it again.) WalMart switched from milk that contained rBST (bovine growth hormone) because consumers asked for it: We changed the biggest company in the world simply with our purchases!

Every time you buy a piece of food, you vote. So if you are hungry for change, you can change the world with every bite.