Food, Inc.

Your regularly scheduled programming will not be seen this evening, and I will instead be bringing you this special report. Okay, so maybe that sounds more dire and professional than it needs to, particularly since this is just a blog, but regardless I will not be posting about a Shakespeare play tonight. Instead I want to discuss the documentary I saw on PBS this week titled “Food, Inc.” and its effect on me.

I’ve heard rumblings about what happens before our food reaches the market in the past, and I’d even heard about some of the things this film talks about as well. Hearing people mention it as a joke or just babble about it out of the blue during a conversation is one thing, but seeing it all in this documentary with my own eyes was another. You always hear the term “eye opening”, but in this case it really truly applies.

The Effect

The film addresses many aspects of our food production, including fruits and vegetables, as well as meat. So many documentaries love talking about the unhealthy foods that are out there, but I’ve never really seen one that tackled food as a whole the way this documentary did. It wasn’t just talking about HFCS and sodium in our foods like everyone else does, but how the very concept of food itself has changed, and not necessarily for the better.

The fruits and vegetable parts disturbed me, but not so significantly I won’t touch them at the store. I’d rather not, and we do grow our own and try to buy from the farmers market, but sometimes that option just isn’t on the table. At least in those cases I’m just taking in the inferior food, which doesn’t provide the benefits and nutrition that a real and properly grown and ripened tomato or other fruit or vegetable would. While it will definitely inspire me to seek out properly grown and ripened foods more aggressively, I can’t say I’ll honestly swear off the stuff as much as I’d like to.

It was the meat portion that really disturbed me more than anything. I’ve already been buying the more expensive milk that is free of rBST, since I’m not only concerned about how its presence might effect my own health, but also the ethics of artificially introducing hormones that will effect a living creatures natural functions. What’s being done to chickens is so much worse, and it honestly really disturbed me to watch that segment and see how we treat and harvest living things like a science experiment with an utter disrespect to life. Seriously, this felt like we’d taken the role of the machines in “The Matrix”, only for a source of food rather than energy, though that’s somewhat similar. We pump them up with drugs or hormones or whatever to make them grow bigger and faster than they’re supposed to, which destroys them from the insides and makes them so big they can’t even walk. It’s disgusting, and these are living creatures, regardless of their intelligence or position on the food chain. The conditions they’re kept in is just as bad, and the chicken house they did show us the inside of was even better than the more common dark houses used today.

Now I’m not some person that believes that eating animals is wrong, not at all. There’s a natural food chain and we’re carnivores by nature, so we’re simply doing what nature intended for us to do. Nature did not intend for us to biologically manipulate other living creatures just to make them bigger and fatter at the cost of their quality of life when they are among the living, not to mention the potential effect this could have on us. Heck, meat has gotten nastier and greasier since when I was a child, and it wouldn’t shock me at all to find that this irresponsible and unethical “science” is responsible for it. Not only are we manipulating these creatures at a biological level in this way, but then we force them to live so packed they can hardly move if they wanted to in dark houses for every day of their life.

The worst part was the companies, which threatened these farmers if they allowed filming inside those houses, and the one farmer that did mysteriously lost her contract shortly after filming. If they had allowed filming inside the houses, regardless of how bad it really is, at least it would demonstrate that the company that knows the business doesn’t think it’s a bad thing. They didn’t though, which only demonstrates that these companies know it’s wrong and know how bad it is and just don’t want the consumers to know it. They wouldn’t even come on camera to defend themselves, or even make a statement to read or put up on the screen. They also force debt on these farmers as part of a means to control them, in spite of the farmers earnings being below the poverty line.

That’s just one example of how the  business world takeover of our food, which is a fundamental part of our lives, has all but destroyed the quality and ethics of the market. I’m telling ya, co-ops and farmers markets never looked so good as they do now, and I know that I definitely won’t be sending my money to the likes of Tyson anymore. In fact, I’ve never been closer to considering vegetarianism than I am right now. Maybe that’s not the objective of the film makers, but that’s how I feel after having seen it, at least until there’s some serious reform. I seriously recommend people see this documentary and see for themselves what has become of our agricultural system, and then appeal to the FDA to stop turning a blind eye to these disgusting practices.

The Plan

Sadly, I’m a meat addict, and there’s nothing I love more than a good steak or burger. So I’ll be taking a more conscientious approach to my shopping and food intake from here on out. As I said above, I do not consider meat eating itself to be an evil or unethical practice. It’s how nature designed us and how the animal kingdom works, so I’m not one of those preachy and misguided people who preaches the evils of eating meat. I’m all for letting them have it that way if they want, but I just don’t buy it.

No, it’s the ethics of our food industries that I’ll preach against, and the meat industry is a large portion of that. However, it is not the only portion of that, and the documentary clearly showed horrible practices involved in our vegetables and fruits and other items as well. This isn’t just about meats and HFCS, but about what has become of these industries as a whole.

Now, I’ve always made an effort to buy organic foods. I don’t buy pop-tarts or Skippy peanut butter for example, but the natural peanut butter that needs to be refrigerated, or the organic toaster pastries from Nature’s Path. Those are just two examples, but I’ve always made an effort to buy the better quality and organic foods over the cheaper mass-market garbage. At this point though I’ll be making a greater effort, and even look in to the companies that produce these foods to find the company that is clearly the more responsible and ethical company, or even purchase from co-ops and local markets if something can be obtained there. There’s a lot of options out there outside the giant conglomerate grocery stores, and I intend to look in to them more fully.

Meat will be my biggest change. I’m going to phase out meat to quite an extent. It will be a hard process and a lengthy one, but I feel it will be the better choice. Meat was never intended to be the center of the human diet, which is how we treat it here in the US. Entrees and meals are always about that central meat and whatever we feel like placing around it to round things out, but make no mistake about it, that meat is the star of the show. It shouldn’t be that way, and I intend to take that to heart, including incorporating some fully vegetarian meals in to my diet every week as well.

When I buy meat, I’m going to start buying the more expensive stuff that is produced locally from free range cattle and poultry, instead of the conglomerate produced mass-market cheap crap that I’ve now seen comes from some of the most untrustworthy and unethical practices imaginable. I intend to treat meat as something of a luxury, which is really what it should be. The increased cost of the well produced meat will obviously make that a bit easier, heh, but I’m not going to let my pocketbook be used as an excuse to convince myself that these unethical practices can be ignored. Plus, as I said, meat isn’t even supposed to be the center of the diet as our culture seems to think it should be.

I don’t expect this change will come fast and easy, but I’m convinced they’re not only the best changes from an ethical standpoint, but also in regards to my own personal health. My co-worker is a vegetarian, and he has a lot of options that don’t involve meat and he also buys from co-ops and markets as well, since he is very conscientious about his food. He’s got a good handle on things, and I’ll definitely be using him as a resource.

All in all, I have to say this is really a long overdue change anyways. Whether for ethics or health, there’s no doubt in my mind that a change in how I perceive food is definitely in order and this documentary really served as something of a last straw in this regard.

© 2010, Keonyn. All rights reserved.

Tags: Documentary, Food Inc., PBS