Any good progressive these days knows of the slew of food awareness media put out by the likes of Michael Pollan and Jonathan Safran Foer. Pollan's books The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, and Safran Foer's Eating Animals cover some of the same territory. In a nutshell, factory farming is evil, and we should eat less meat. While Safran Foer actively promotes vegetarianism in contrast to Pollan, both writers employ some similar arguments including the health argument, the environmental argument, and the animal welfare argument.
The recent documentary, Food Inc, which contains extensive commentary from Michael Pollan, then should be expected to echo many of the same arguments that Pollan has made elsewhere. I decided to watch it as a member of the choir to which it preaches, rather than as a student looking for new lessons.
Food Inc surprised me by actually touching on more concrete arguments than theoretical arguments for animal welfare or environmentalism. Instead, it focuses on individual people and their stories. As the title suggests, the main argument for being more conscious about food decisions that Food Inc promotes is that food has become hijacked by a corporate industry that doesn't care about individuals. Companies like Monsanta, Tyson, and Cargill exploit the American consumer, the American government, and their own workers. The documentary opens with a segment on chicken farming. Although I'm pretty knowledgeable of the terrible conditions for chickens and the incredibly unnatural rate at which they are made to grow these days, I had no idea the extent to which individuals farmers are taken advantage of. According to Food Inc, a typically chicken farmer must take out $500,000 in loans, only to make $18,000 a year from Tyson/Purdue. Of course, Purdue controls all the prices and requires farmers to upgrade to expensive equipment in order to maintain their contracts. A woman interviewed in the film loses her contract after failing to upgrade to a close-aired chicken house. It's akin to the sharecropping system.
Other individual stories include a man who is sued by Monsanto for attempting to help farmers infringe on Monsanto's patents. Though Monsanto knows they can't win the case, they know it will hurt the farmers more in legal fees. We also meet a Latino family that shows that it's impossible for them to rationalize paying more money for produce when Burger King's Dollar Menu is more filling. Then there's Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, a actual non-factory farm. We see him killing chickens in a humane way as he tells the camera how the USDA tried to shut him down for slaughtering chickens in the open air.
Ultimately, Food Inc doesn't call for vegetarianism, but for greater transparency. This is something Americans should demand of any industry or institution.
The recent documentary, Food Inc, which contains extensive commentary from Michael Pollan, then should be expected to echo many of the same arguments that Pollan has made elsewhere. I decided to watch it as a member of the choir to which it preaches, rather than as a student looking for new lessons.
Food Inc surprised me by actually touching on more concrete arguments than theoretical arguments for animal welfare or environmentalism. Instead, it focuses on individual people and their stories. As the title suggests, the main argument for being more conscious about food decisions that Food Inc promotes is that food has become hijacked by a corporate industry that doesn't care about individuals. Companies like Monsanta, Tyson, and Cargill exploit the American consumer, the American government, and their own workers. The documentary opens with a segment on chicken farming. Although I'm pretty knowledgeable of the terrible conditions for chickens and the incredibly unnatural rate at which they are made to grow these days, I had no idea the extent to which individuals farmers are taken advantage of. According to Food Inc, a typically chicken farmer must take out $500,000 in loans, only to make $18,000 a year from Tyson/Purdue. Of course, Purdue controls all the prices and requires farmers to upgrade to expensive equipment in order to maintain their contracts. A woman interviewed in the film loses her contract after failing to upgrade to a close-aired chicken house. It's akin to the sharecropping system.
Other individual stories include a man who is sued by Monsanto for attempting to help farmers infringe on Monsanto's patents. Though Monsanto knows they can't win the case, they know it will hurt the farmers more in legal fees. We also meet a Latino family that shows that it's impossible for them to rationalize paying more money for produce when Burger King's Dollar Menu is more filling. Then there's Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, a actual non-factory farm. We see him killing chickens in a humane way as he tells the camera how the USDA tried to shut him down for slaughtering chickens in the open air.
Ultimately, Food Inc doesn't call for vegetarianism, but for greater transparency. This is something Americans should demand of any industry or institution.