Wellness by Ryan

Have you heard of the newly released movie, Food, Inc.? It’s a documentary on our over-processed, chemically-ridden, corrupt food system. Watch the trailer here . It’s only out in select theaters, but you can see dates and places of release here. I strongly encourage you to go see it! It wouldn’t hurt to bring a friend who’s not so enlightened about just how unnatural the American food system is. I’m very excited to see it, and if you do, let me know what you thought!


Why are they scared? Well, “Food, Inc.” is being billed by its makers as the film that food industry titans don’t want you to see for the simple reason that “if you know the truth about what you’re eating…you might not want to eat it anymore,” as journalist Eric Schlosser says in the movie’s first five minutes. He might be right, although I’m not hopeful: I knew cigarettes were bad for me, and the tobacco companies I was financially supporting were essentially sociopathic, but I still smoked for 10 years.
What’s really worrisome about the industry’s multimillion-dollar anti-”Food, Inc.” campaign is that it could discourage a critical subset of people from seeing the movie: farmers.
Which would be a shame. Because even as our current food system has made Americans fatter and sicker than at any time in history, it’s driven more and more farmers out of business. The massive overproduction of cheap unhealthy food is not working for consumers, and it doesn’t seem to be working for farmers, either. “Food Inc.” persuasively confirms what the real “real food” movement has long held: the only beneficiaries of our current food system are giant agribusiness corporations such as Tyson, Smithfield, Monsanto, and others like them.Among the points that galvanized the filmmakers:

– In 1972, the Food and Drug Administration conducted 50,000 food safety inspections; in 2006, the FDA conducted 9,164.

– During the George W. Bush administration, the head of the FDA was the former executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association, and the chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry in Washington.

– Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not designed to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus that sicken tens of thousands of Americans annually.

– One in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes; among minorities, the rate will be 1 in 2.

Kenner, a Los Angeles documentarian, says he did not set out to make an activist horror film. In fact, his original goal was to tell the story from the points of view of both organic and industrial food growers. But representatives of the 50 industrial food companies he contacted, including Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson and Smithfield, would not talk and, more important, would not allow their production practices to be filmed.

“The fact is they don’t want us to see how the food is made,” said Kenner during a recent visit to San Francisco. “They don’t want us to know what’s in it. And, ultimately, they don’t want us talking about it.”
Kenner said he spent six years trying to make a film that would not appear one-sided or biased but admits he ended up with a “connect-the-dots” portrait of the American food system that is “Orwellian.”

Among the film’s subjects is Carole Morison, a Maryland chicken farmer, who risks her livelihood to show the repulsive conditions under which her chickens are fed and housed, per Perdue’s requirements. Morison is seen wading through a barn so stuffed with chickens covered in their own feces that there is no view of the floor. She sets about her daily chore: grabbing the birds that have died from trampling because they grew too fat to walk.

“I understand why farmers don’t want to talk, because these companies can do whatever they want to do as far as pay goes,” says Morison in the film. Equally maddening is Kenner’s portrait of a working-class Los Angeles family, who talk about why they eat fast food most nights: It’s cheaper than a home-cooked meal – because, as Pollan points out, it is largely made from processed corn, wheat and soybean, crops that are often genetically modified and heavily subsidized by the government.