HW # 10 - Food, Inc. Response

HW 10 – Food Inc. Response

1. The main idea that Food Inc gets across is that the major industrial food companies care more about profit made from their food than they do about quality and the health of their consumers. The low income and mostly overweight family featured in the super market and the drive-through Burger King are victims of the greedy food companies. The father has to take expensive medication for his diabetes making the choice between expensive broccoli and a whopper end up in the whopper’s favor. Then we see the inhumanity of the meat industry with a visit to a hog processing plant where black and Hispanic workers are shipped in daily in packed vans during a 50 mile drive to work with dangerous conveyer belts speedily slicing raw meat parts. The environment is so nasty that it is not surprising that harmful bacteria like E.coli gets into the meat. There is a picture of a 2 year old child who dies from E.coli and an interview with his mother who is leading a campaign to shut down unsafe processing plants. The movie next deals with the production of corn and soybeans, and we find out that our taxes subsidized farmers to produce far more corn than is needed in order to make animal feed, plastics, diapers, Motrin, and corn syrup for Coke and a thousand other products. We learn that the Monsanto company, for example, forces farmers to buy new seeds of corn every year and would sue them if they tried to hold seeds over for the next year. It seems that in every way the farmer gets screwed by the big agribusinesses and the tax payers get screwed for having to subsidize the farmers. Industrial agricultural companies, in other words, only benefit themselves.

2. By showing an actual processing plant, and feed lot with crammed in cattle and a half dead cow, the movie makes the cruelty to workers and animals very real. It is also great to see the real Joel Salatin in the flesh because he has such an important role in The Omnivore’s Dillemma. The book, on the other hand gives a lot more information about Joel and explains why his method of farming is so different and better than industrial organic farming.

3. At the end of the movie someone says that the truth about all theat is bad in the food industry in this country will come out the way it did with the tobacco industry but it doesn’t seem that this will happen fast enough. As corrupt and dangerous as the situation is, you would think that there would be some kind of huge protest recommended to be made by the American public. Instead the movie just ends telling you to eat local foods that are in season, but it doesn’t tell you the way the book does that by eating local foods there is much less use of fossil fuels for the transportation of the food.