Last night I stayed in and watched a movie all by my lonesome.  I had a few choices on Netflix up for grabs, and I wound up settling on this one.  Food, Inc. is an Academy-Award nominated film about the food industry and the way in which we have no clue what we’re eating or where it comes from.  It touches on a lot of the issues of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food nation.  It really got under my skin and has made me a more aware consumer, which I like.  Allow me to share.

First, they spend a good bit of time on the health issues that surround food.  Diabetes, obesity, and the onslaught of preventatable illnesses that arise from a poor diet are scoured, as are the cases of E. coli contamination in meat and the inexplicable inability of companies to recall that meat.  Apparently, cows have started contracting E. coli because their diet is entirely corn-based, when it should be grass-based.  Rather than feed the cows grass, they have come up with elaborate tech fixes that mitigate the symptoms but don’t have any impact on the actual problem.  It’s a poignant example of the expert-based culture in which we live and the desire for “progress” outweighing common sense.

This leads to the nature of large-scale conglomerates running your food.  Everything from Tyson making all your chicken to Monsanto owning all your soybeans.  A few multinationals have swept up the rest of the smaller companies, leaving substandard products in their wake.  It is the omnipresent capitalistic desires of speed, efficiency, and low cost that have given us chickens and cows that are raised so fat they can’t walk more than a few steps, live and die knee-deep in their own excrement, and eat food that they shouldn’t be.  The power of these companies stretches into the regulatory agencies that follow them as well, with FDA and USDA directors being shared by the board of directors of these multinational firms.

While this stuff does a fine job of stirring up my populist rage, the most interesting thing I pulled from the film was what exactly it was that I’m eating.  I wasn’t that, despite the illusion of variety, pretty much all food is made from corn.  Or some bastardized version of corn cooked up in a lab.  If you see these ingredients, you’re eating corn: high-fructose corn syrup, Dextrin/Maltodextrin, mono or di-glycerides, sorbitol, ascorbic acid, or xanthan gum.  While most of these products are naturally produced in some other fashion, the low cost of corn has caused companies to used corn-based varieties instead.

There’s a lot more that could be said, but I’m sure it would be much more interesting to simply watch the movie.  If you have Netflix, you can grab it on the instant streaming, which is convenient.  And if it’s any testament to the effectiveness of this documentary, I’m going to buy my weekly groceries from one of those hippie health stores.

Rating: 9/10

Check out the website here:http://www.foodincmovie.com/index.php

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