Food Inc.

Sunday night my wife and I sat down to watch Food Inc., the fantastic Oscar-nominated documentary about the corporate nightmare that is the American agricultural industry. I would be hard-pressed to find someone - save for the CEO of Tyson - who wouldn't be affected in some small way by this film. There weren't many bullet points that one could genuinely consider as previously unknown but the way they filmmakers delivered them was sobering to say the least. There were some shocking scenes (the kill floor of the hog slaughterhouse; cows standing ankle deep in their own filth, etc) yet I thought the film did well to avoid the easy lay-up, PETA-style impact shots that would turn even the strongest stomach to mush. The point wasn't to get us to stop eating meat or pork - or food in general - but rather to pull back the veil and fully understand the stranglehold large food corporations have on the supply chain.

Some major points worth noting:

• In 1970 the Top 5 meat packing companies were responsible for 25% of the market. Today, due to corporate consolidation, the top 4 companies are responsible for 80%.

• The USDA is essentially a toothless oversight group that monitors producers to ensure that standards are being upheld, but has no jurisdiction to actually enforce anything. The film notes that the USDA, per regulation, moved to shut down one slaughterhouse which had repeatedly failed bacteria tests. The parent companies lawyers fought the shut-down in court and won on the basis that the USDA lacked proper jurisdiction to do so.
  

• Patent laws put in place a decade ago paved the way for one company, Monsanto, to copyright a genetically-modified strain of soy bean seed that resists pesticides. At face value seems fair enough, except that they dominate the market and constantly sue non-par farmers for infringement when the Monsanto crops cross-pollinate with the little guy's crops, lawsuits that have put the small farmers out of business, one by one.
  

• Stonyfield Farm, an organic grower/raiser, is leading the charge to fight back against factory farming and putting Organic products on the map by selling to big retailers like Wal-Mart. I enjoyed this free-market approach to fighting off the big guys. As Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg says,
  
  
  

  “We’re on the battlefield now and we need to fight with the same weaponry. We need to not be David up against Goliath. We need to be Goliath.”

• The scene where a Latino family goes shopping for broccoli and emphatically state that it's "cheaper to buy McDonald's than groceries"... ugh... This was the one spot I wish had been framed a little differently. It's ludicrous to claim that four happy meals costs more than a 99-cent pound of pasta and a $2 jar of sauce. Sure its easier to hit the drive through, but the laziness factor was curiously removed from the equation. At some point, personal responsibility has to come into play.
  

• The heartbreaking story of Kevin Kowalcyk, who died at 2 years old from E.coli poisoning after eating a hamburger. The story outlined the power of industry lobbyists and their ability to block legislation over food-borne illness regulation and the aforementioned USDA misfires. Now, I'm certainly not a pro-regulation, big government guy but this segment was tremendously moving. Say what you want about a free-market, self-regulation approach to product safety but when the big guns are so big that dirty plants are left unchecked, it points to major, major flaws in our government system.
  

• The finishing note. Epic. I really like how they drove the point home about how you, as an individual, can affect change in this massive system. A much better tactic than "Big Business is bad! Vote Democrat!!" that most documentaries wrap with today *cough* Michael Moore *cough*. Instead the films ends with a checklist of how you can cast your "vote" 3 times a day.
  

I personally felt good about a few things by the end of this movie. That there exist people like Gary Hirshberg, who understand that pure radicalism isn't the only answer to fighting the big show. That my wife is already cognoscente about what foods come into our house and works to buy as organic as possible. That we've been planning a raised garden bed to grow our own vegetables this year.

This movie may not teach you anything new, but it will inspire you to think twice about what it is you're putting on the dinner plate. Needless to say, I highly recommend giving it a whirl.