Locally Grown or Nothing At All for me Thanks.

So today when I was looking through Netflix I found a new instant movie called Food Inc. It was a very surprising movie by the fact that it had such an impact on me this time around. We have been going over local farming, factory farming, corn, fast food, and have tied that all together yet for some reason this movie was the last straw for me. The stories and the footage alone changed my perspective in a way I didn’t seriously consider before, that I never want to buy factory grown meat again. This could just be an aftermath of being completely disgusted through the entire movie but I will point out some disturbing parts that I have found interesting.
The first part focused on the production of chickens. The thing that got me going was when they showed the little chicks being pushed down a conveyor belt in to steel tubes where a human punctures their neck to keep track of it. It literally would make you think that these people have no souls, I could never treat a living creature as if it was not living at all, just a product. I understand that we produce these chickens for food but isn’t there anyway to make it more humane? Tyson, being one of the four most powerful meat packing industries, would not even let cameramen inside the chicken houses. That makes you wonder, why can we not see the food that is being produced to feed us? Like Dr. Kleppel had told our class during his presentation, if anyone asked him to see how he did things and to see the condition of his animals he would gladly say yes he has nothing to hide. These chickens that are put on top of each other in a dark confined place are all genetically modified so that they are full grown in 48 days rather than 70 days and also their breasts are now four times the size they used to be because consumers prefer white meat. I prefer white meat but would rather the chicken live a full happy life rather than a life sitting since it is too big to even carry itself around.
The last thing I want to address about this movie and was new information to me was the safety of our food, or really the lack thereof. Even 30 years ago the FDA inspection rate was about 50,000 per year the numbers in today’s world is just over 9,000. Why the sudden decrease in extra insurance that we are eating safe food? What one congressman said was that we have really become to rely on “self-policing” that is to say if someone in the company knows there is a contamination they should report it. But haven’t you realized that most factory workers are immigrants? Why would anyone report a thing if it risked their livelihood and the fact that they could be in this country illegally as well. Also if our government is relying on big shot companies to admit when something is going wrong seems ridiculous in itself. There are a lot of previously high ladder employee from these big companies that now work for the FDA and USDA and we are relying on them to scrutinize the companies they worked for? Some have even took this advantage and helped pass new laws to hide the contents of what is in our food, such as if it was genetically enhanced. Something that really shocked me is that if there is an outbreak of salmonella in the meat the USDA does NOT have the power to shut down that plant. This is the story that hit me hard since they focused on a personal story of a woman who is trying to pass Kevin’s Law which is to give the USDA back its power to shut down plants that are producing contaminated meat. Kevin was a 2 year old boy who died from the E coli O157:H7 strand because of an factory that knew they had a contamination but was not recalled until 3 weeks after the discovery. The woman hired a private investigator to track this information down and the fact that this company was still letting their product go on the shelves was just incredible.
Instead of fearing these large corporations why can we not fight against them? There was one part of the film where it showed a man who was a local farmer who let his cows wonder and feed on grass, his pigs were treated properly, his chickens out in the open air was actually almost shut down because he handled his chickens in the outdoors. Their reasoning was that the air pollutes the meat but when a microbiologist checked his poultry it came up that the chicken had 133 CFUs compared to the 3,000 + found in factory chicken. Obviously locally bred meat is far superior to what we are buying at the supermarket. So the lasting message here was that we clearly do not know what we are eating, it looks good and taste good so it must be good. It is an ignorant way of looking at things and I realize this now and hope to improve my food choices from here on out.
If anyone is interested in learning more they put up a link at the end of the movie: http://www.takepart.com/foodinc


Resource
The Movie - Food Inc.