Kevinslaw - Blog Posts

Food, Inc.

Director: Robert Kenner

Film website: http://www.takepart.com/foodinc

Images: google search

To open my mind I decided to watch a documentary per week, the first one was Food Inc. the idea of this documentary was to show the public the truth about the food industry, the truth that is being deliberately hidden from us. Over the past fifty years the industry has changed more than the previous ten thousand, but “the image of our food is still the image of Gregorian America”.

Learning about sustainability, I was taught that you must think about it as a pure solution, meaning it must be socially just, economically just as well as environmental. A product is not sustainable if it is cheap and doesn’t harm the planet, but those who make it are treated poorly or underpaid.

This documentary is broken into related chapters that discuss how this omission of truth is perpetuated throughout the food industry. First in Monopoly of Food you learn the basics of how the assembly line being integrated into the food industry, enabling them to grow and grow into a power, absolute power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

One woman, Carol, works as a chicken farmer for Perdue. Even with open windows, it looks and feels like a concentration camp—thru the screen into my NYC apartment. The chickens are all bocking and running but nowhere to go. But there not running, the rapid growth of their breasts does not match with the normal rate of their bones and internal organs so they can only take a few steps before they collapse.

She talks about her own lack of control—the initial agreement with a company is an “initial investment” into t a chicken house, but then you have to pay for new equipment, upgrades and maintenance as said by the company or lose your contract so you just go deeper and deeper into a financial hole. She feels degraded, Perdue declined to do an interview for this film as many others and ended Carols contract when she refused to “upgrade” to windowless coops. I guess she didn’t want to degrade her chickens.

On the other hand we have Vince, a chicken farmer for Tyson. He comes on before Carol with sweet light country music in the background and more than a bit of hillbilly in his voice. He talks about how the chicken industry saved his neighborhood when the tobacco industry left and proudly shows off the coops of his and local farmers. But what gets me is where his heart is; ““if you could grow a chicken in 49 days why would you want one you gotta grow in three months—more money in your pocket. These chickens never see sunlight, they’re pretty much in the dark all the time”. On screen a message comes up

Vince had offered to show us inside his chicken houses. But after multiple visits by Tyson representatives, he changed his mind

Carol feels degraded, Vince is in the dark.

But it’s not just how the people are treated that is deplorable or how animals are treated beforehand that make them unsafe, it is also how they are processed after. CAFO short for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation deals with both the before and after their death.

The true deplorable outcome is seen with the death of two-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk who died due to as explained to his parents Hemorrhagic E.Coli (you know Hemorrhagic, internal bleeding, like Hemorrhagic fever also known as Ebola) from eating a hamburger contaminated with E.Coli. His mother, Barb, in a meeting with her Colorado State Representative Diana DeGette, tells that while her son was already in the hospital when the plant that processed the hamburger was inspected, it took another 16 days after he died for it to be closed. That delay is inexcusable. Now, Barb is meeting with her representative in her fight for Kevin’s law which would give the USDA back the ability to close down plants that repeatedly failed inspection, a responsibility and job taken away from them when sued by Supreme Beef. In December 2001 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that the Agriculture Department does not have the authority to shut down a meat-processing plant that repeatedly failed tests for salmonella contamination. This makes me question that USDA organic stamp of approval, and as Barb says

“we put faith in our government to protect us, and we are not being protected at a most basic level”

The Dollar Menu

I remember seeing this clip in school, and it’s a great additive to see things from a different perspective of understanding the situations of the poor; and a very, very hidden cost of food. Maria Andrea Gonzalez talks for –and she can go on for much longer. She feels guilty, now that she knows that the food is unhealthy for her children and her husband who is very sick and takes many, expensive, medications. But they work hard long hours and she would love to feed her children better. But they can get 5 hamburgers, 2 chicken sandwiches and 3 drinks for $11.48. The pears and broccoli are $0.99 and $1.29  per pound and it won’t feed them. Candy is cheaper, chips are cheaper soda is really cheap and when you only have a dollar to spend to feed your kids—you don’t want them to go hungry. They are not the only ones in their community that are facing these problems, and there’s is not the only community facing these problems. There are people in your community who deal with this too, you included. Maybe you just don’t know

What would you find if you calculated the cost of multiple fast foods, stomach cramps, diabetes, extra health insurance extra tests and so on and so on into your monthly budget of fast food? Would it really be cheap?

In the Grass

Faster fatter bigger cheaper is the mindset of the industrial food industry, not of what process makes healthy, good food. The decisions of what we eat and how what we eat is handled and created is no longer done by farmers, but of corporations that are far from seeing the ugly truth. You can get arrested and fined for taking a picture of a food processing plant, because they want you to be in the dark. If the process, as we saw with Vince from Tyson earlier in the film, was shown the companies know that people would not be happy. The live off omitting the truth, survive off it, profit off it.

You hear a lot about how illegal immigrants take your jobs; but how?

Eduardo Pena, a union organizer, shows how illegal workers of Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina are taken in the middle of the night with an agreement with immigration to avoid slowing of production by only taking a few each night instead of a big raid. No one arrests anyone Smithfield managers,

“We want to pay the cheapest price for our food, we don’t understand that that comes at a price” these workers have been here for ten to fifteen years, processing your bacon packaging your ham and now they are getting picked up like they are criminals and these companies are making billions of dollars”

Hidden Costs

We dive more into the hidden or displaced costs of our “cheap food” with David Runyon asking the main question

“Is cheapness everything that there is? I mean are we willing to buy the cheapest car?”

He likes where he is, he makes enough to live and supplies the customers that he has, for him if more and more people come well then he’ll see. But he fears that once you “go for that growth” how you see your customers and products and market changes. But that’s for him, a ‘corporate organic’ food company, is not an oxymoron.

I cannot speak for Gary Hirshberg, the CEO of Stonyfield Farm.But starting from scratch, an idealistic background and working on bringing organic to the forefront and not only an option but a preferred option for consumers; to have Walmart knock on your door to hear how you do it and have you two work together so your product can grow more must be a top ten if not the highlight my career so far.

In addition, Tony Airoso, the Chief Dairy Purchaser of Walmart confirms the old thought and expression that the consumers do have the power of the dollar even with the biggest companies and monarchies. They’re going organic, having it as an option because with every scanned product the saw a trend in their customers wanting organic and when they know it’s what their customer’s wants, “it’s really easy to get behind it”

But on the road to change in every battle there are peaks and there are valleys and even if you know nothing about the food industry, going organic, equal rights, the rights of farmers, I’m sure you now the company Monstanto

From Seed to the Supermarket

Here we meet Moe Parr a Seed Cleaner and Troy VP American Corn Growers Association. Both tried to continue their careers, unrelated to Monstanto, but we’re sued anyway. Both gave in, Moe who had spent over 25,000 dollars before even stepping foot inside a court room and Troy who had spent 400,000 was going to have to spend at least another million to go to court settled because they just couldn’t afford it

Another, more famous case not with Monsanto but similar, was when Oprah was sued due to the Veggie (ironic) libel laws when she gave her opinion about not liking a burger by texas cattleman for loss of profit. After six years and nearly one million in litigation she won—but really, who other than Oprah can do that

The food industry fights and fights to not have food labeled as being for foreign countries, as containing GMOs, the calories, so much that we now label things organic. But really think, why should it be labeled organic. A carrot is a carrot unless it’s not, why can’t we assume that a carrot is a carrot. Why isn’t is the other way around?

The documentary ends a few more shocks, but mostly tips and hope for us and the food industry, with “This Land is your Land” playing in the background. Because we do have the power, every conscious buy tells the food industry what we want and if Walmart will change and see’s it profitable to change; then we can get them all to change.