Food, Inc.: Taking a closer look at the food you eat

Tonight, my wife and I watched Food, Inc., a highly informative 90-minute documentary that takes a close look at the food we eat and where it comes from. We were expecting to see many revolting pictures of animals being butchered. There certainly were a fair amount of butchering scenes, although the creators of the film constantly focused on presenting useful information rather than trying to shock the viewer. This video was not made to appeal unfairly to the emotions. It was made to present compelling information about an important series of food-related issues. Watching this video reminded me of something that was quite disturbing. The mainstream media and our own government do not starkly peel back the happy veneer of the food production industry. Thus, Food, Inc. also serves as a meta-indictment of those failed institutions of government and the media. Each of the eleven topics covered was compelling, and each of them was presented with a fair amount of balance, despite the fact that most of the corporations running factory farms refused to appear in the video. Consider that Wal-Mart (and a few other companies) was presented as a corporation that was actually trying to make some changes that would benefit the health of Americans-it was not presented as a perfect corporation, but it was given credit for trying to make some changes in the right direction. One corporation in the video was presented as notoriously evil: Monsanto, based in my hometown of St. Louis Missouri. What else could you say about a corporation that refuses to allow farmers to use seeds from their crops, and surreptitiously watches farmers with a team of 75 intimidating investigators, bringing many of them to court for daring to reuse their seeds. This has never before happened in the history of the world that a farmer has lost the right to use his or her own seed crop as he or she wants. If you're thinking, "Well, they should never have signed up to buy that genetically modified seed in the first place," the video will have you thinking again. Some of the victims are non-Monsanto-customer farmers in nearby fields, who were forced to defend themselves in court at great expense after Monsanto accused them of illegally using Montana's product, whereas the seeds often blow onto their property from neighbors' fields. The episode about the seed-washer sued by Monsanto is heartbreaking. After watching Food Inc., you'll never think the same way about corn. I'm not talking about enjoying a fresh meal of corn on the cob--get that image out of your head. I'm talking about highly processed corn. Almost anything you might purchase at a typical grocery store is pumped full of empty calories and questionable substances derived from processed corn (and soybeans). If you're wondering why corn-based sodas and chips are so cheap, and broccoli and peas are so expensive, the answer lies in federal subsidies controlled by huge agribusinesses. Imagine a world where healthy foods were cheap and where foods injected with corn fructose were not subsidized-- that's certainly not the world in which we live. The video reveals that many of the purportedly great variety of fast foods are actually dressed up processed corn. One of the most memorable lines for me was uttered by an especially articulate man who raises organic meat (you know, where animals were not confined in small dark spaces and forced to eat corn, but are actually allowed to eat grass and to graze). He suggested that if huge meat factories (chicken, hogs and beef) were forced to make their factories with transparent walls, people would stop buying their products. It was interesting that the only footage from inside the factory farms was through the use of hidden cameras. The big factory farms refused to give tours to the producers. One exception was a woman farmer who had had enough of it, and went on camera to give a tour of her chicken farm, which was actually run in a much more humane way than most of the dark enclosed factories where the great majority of America's chickens are raised and slaughtered. Even her operation, considerably more humane than most factory farms (it actually was open to sunlight) still wasn't a pretty sight. Another thing I found revolting was the way that it illegal immigrants work hard to produce food for the rest of America, some of them for a dozen years or more, but they are unceremoniously rounded up from their trailers up in a constant stream of police raids. All of this while the companies that have made constant use of the hard labor of these undocumented people are left unscathed. There are very few raids for illegal immigrants at the factory farms-this would interfere with the profitable assembly line. Image by Raman at Flickr (with permission) Image by Raman at Flickr (with permission) There's a lot more to Food, Inc. then I've described in this brief post. I highly recommend that you watch Food Inc. if you care about what you're putting in your stomach. Even if you think you have a cast-iron stomach, take a look at Food Inc. and you'll be primed to start eating more smartly. Although much of the information presented in this video is disturbing, the video is full of good suggestions for what you can do about these problems. So is the movie's website (with regard to each of these topics, simply click the "Learn More" link).

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Our love-hate relationship with animals

In "Flesh of your Flesh," published in the November 9, 2009 edition of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reviews several books that investigate the kinds of creatures we eat. Well, actually, we love our creatures too:

Forty-six million families in the United States own at least one dog, and thirty-eight million keep cats. Thirteen million maintain freshwater aquariums in which swim a total of more than a hundred and seventy million fish. Collectively, these creatures cost Americans some forty billion dollars annually.
We love our animals, but we also love to eat them:
This year, they will cook roughly twenty-seven billion pounds of beef, sliced from some thirty-five million cows. Additionally, they will consume roughly twenty-three billion pounds of pork, or the bodies of more than a hundred and fifteen million pigs, and thirty-eight billion pounds of poultry, some nine billion birds. Most of these creatures have been raised under conditions that are, as Americans know—or, at least, by this point have no excuse not to know—barbaric.
Isn't this a contradiction that we love our pets but that we don't care that we treat farm animals so incredibly badly? Kohler quotes Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals: “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list.”

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The Monsanto monster

Monsanto has been a target for many years. They have a terrible environmental and health record, they have harassed small farmers for years, they've bribed officials in Indonesia, and they've joked about performing "rural cleansing" (a play on the words "ethnic cleansing", i.e. genocide), and told small seed cleaners that rather than buy them out, "We'd rather put you out of business, it's more fun that way." All this from the company that brought Agent Orange to Vietnam, resulting in 400,000 deaths and disabilities, as well as 500,000 children born with birth defects. However, in the world of corporate PR, no sin is too big. Monsanto has sought to remake its image as the company that's helping to feed the world. Their website claims that "We apply innovation and technology to help farmers around the world produce more while conserving more. We help farmers grow yield sustainably so they can be successful, produce healthier foods, better animal feeds and more fiber, while also reducing agriculture's impact on our environment." High claims, to be sure. Too bad we don't know if they hold up to scrutiny. A new article by the editors of Scientific American explains the situation:

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

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How peak oil affects food and everything else

Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called "Blind Spot" which

explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as "Peak Oil," the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.

You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:
  • The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
  • Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
  • It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
  • The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
  • The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.
See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.

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Fat and salt and sugar and fat and salt and . . .

Amy Goodman recently interviewed David Kessler, who used to be Commissioner of the FDA under Bush I and Bill Clinton. He has really turned up the heat on the unhealthy food industry, and it is a huge industry. It's repeat clients also frequent hospitals in droves, as reported by DemocracyNow:

[A] new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that the direct medical costs of obesity total about $147 billion a year. That amounts to nine percent of all US medical costs. It’s also over $50 billion more than the annual spending on cancer.

The problem is that we have these innate and insatiable cravings for salt and sugar and fat. Fat and sugar, fat and salt, fat, sugar, and salt stimulate us to eat more and more. Does the food industry understand the inputs? Absolutely. They understand that fat, sugar and salt stimulate us, and they understand the outputs. They understand we keep on coming back for more and more, as Kessler explains:

Have they understood the neuroscience? Have they understood how fat and sugar work? I don’t think so. But we now have that science. But what’s important is the fact that they have figured out—they’ve learned it experientially—what works, and they construct food to stimulate us to eat more . . .

What has the food industry done? They’ve taken fat, sugar and salt, they’ve put it on every corner. They’ve made it available 24/7. They’ve made it socially acceptable to eat at any time. They’ve added the emotional gloss of advertising. Look at an ad; you’ll love it, you’ll want it. They’ve made food into entertainment. We’re living, in fact, in a food carnival.

But how much fat, sugar and salt can you possibly pump into food? More than you can imagine. Kessler explains the formula:

So, take an appetizer in a modern American restaurant. Take buffalo wings. What are they? You take the fatty part of the chicken, fried usually in the manufacturing plant first. That loads about 30, 40 percent fat. Fry it again in the kitchen of the restaurant. That loads more fat. That red spicy sauce? What is it? Fat and sugar. That white creamy sauce on the side? Fat and salt. What are we eating? Fat on fat on fat on fat on sugar on fat and salt.

But aren't the obese people the real problem? Why blame the terribly unhealthy food industry (Did you like this framing of the question)? Yes, people need to get disciplined about the way they eat. No doubt. But when 2/3 of American adults are overweight, it's time to assume that the artery-clogging food manufacturers of American are immorally creating an environment ubiquitously filled with toxic supersized portions. In short, I fully support new Congressional legislation would provide up to $10 billion a year for a prevention and public health investment fund that would include a focus on curbing obesity. See this related post on the effect of growing portion sizes.

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