Food, Inc.

Food, Inc (2008). A must see.

Five minutes into this documentary and I was scared. What if I never want to eat meat again? Or chips or even vegetables? This film links food production to assembly line production, to profit motivated multinational corporations, and to unethical husbandry.

It's not that I was surprised by the film -- I was already aware of most of the issues -- however, the footage of brown, dusty fields full of cows, of them standing ankle deep in their own feces, the stumbling, genetically modified, abnormally large breasted chicken, among other things, was truly disturbing.

A farmer in the film, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, struck me as an intelligent, coherent speaker. His husbandry methods make sense. Cows are moved from one pasture to the next so they can graze and fertilize the grass at the same time. This is to show the insanity of subsidizing corn production, putting it into cow feed because it fattens them up, despite knowing that corn increases the chances of e.coli in their digestive tracts.

One more thing. Pigs know things. There was a scene where Salatin is walking around outside towards his pigs, and when he calls to them, they wander lazily towards him. In a contrasting scene, we see footage of the largest slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, and when the workers come in, hordes of pigs jostle and scream in stark, raving terror. What a nightmare. 

Here are some websites I found interesting when I was googling around about Food, Inc.:

This is the movie website:
www.foodincmovie.com

Here is their blog:
www.takepart.com/blog/tag/hungry-for-change