Food Inc Review

I went to see the movie Food Inc over the weekend at the Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak, MI.

Two thumbs up! I think they did a great job at covering a lot of ground in 94 minutes. It is definitely worth watching if you have any interest in food/nutrition.

I was glad to see people coming into the theater holding giant cups of soda pop and big buckets of popcorn. You hate to always be preaching to the choir - so hopefully this movie will attract lots of "normal" people (not just the granola crowd).

I am glad it didn't focus on health, or animal rights, or becoming a vegetarian, nor did it belabor any point too long. The message was primarily aimed at informing the public that the food supply (from seed to shelf) is almost entirely owned by four or five mega corporations, and there are a multitude of implications from that.

Some of the areas the movie covered:

• Crop subsidies (for more great info, check out King Korn)
• Genetically Modified Organisms (farmer's can't save seeds to plant next year)
• Industrial farms and mega agribusiness
  
• Local farms
• Food safety
• Health
  
• Human rights
• Revolving door in the government agencies - from agribusiness
• Illegal workers
  
• Monsanto and the power they wield

Being a member of the Weston A Price Foundation, I was pretty familiar with all of the information covered in the movie. Although, there were a few things that jumped out at me. One of which is that they something that looked like a mini version of the NASA control center. Basically, this mega company had a control center that had real-time live video feeds from about 6 food processing factories around the country. It was kind of "neat" to see how these places operate.

Another eye opener was a meat processing plant that developed a system where they run all the meat through an ammonia bath and then grind it up press it into a rectangle that is about 2 feet by 3 feet, and right into a box. This hamburger meat looked awful (and I am sure it tasted awful too). But, their claim to fame is that there won't be any harmful e coli in the meat. (just other toxins and anti-nutrients)

It was pointed out, that a grain fed cow that is harboring harmful e coli, can effectively rid itself of e coli within a week of eating grass. Hmmmm... Maybe instead of doing all of this chemical processing, they should just let cows eat grass. What a concept!

Another thing that surprised me was the food libel laws. I guess I forgot about the public outcry that was caused by Oprah (beef) in 1996 and the Alar (apples) scare back in 1991. Food libel laws really put a crimp on anybody talking about the awful state of our food.

The final message of the movie was that we can "vote" three times per day by choosing what we eat. They encouraged viewers to buy organic and to buy local. The example of this working was the fact that Walmart started carrying organics, because that is what people were buying. The only downside of "voting" at the supermarket, is that the mega food giants have the government in their back pocket and they don't want foods labelled correctly. They hide the fact that foods are made with genetically modified organisms or that meat is made from cloned animals, etc, etc. So, the only way to truly vote, is by buying direct from farmers.

One last thing, during a part of the movie where they showed this family that eat 3 meals a day of fast food partly because they needed to save money for their medications, a lady sitting behind me asks her husband "Why doesn't Obama focus on the food industry instead of health care?".

Here are two Food, Inc. videos:

Filmmaker Robert Kenner and Michael Pollan explain their new film, "Food, Inc." to John Dickerson.

Food Inc - Official Trailer: An unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.


Enjoy!