day 67 - Food, Inc.

OK film fans tonight we've got a new film and a continuation of a theme on the Oscars. Like any good documentary tonight's film will leave your mind swirling with frightening information, your heart feeling a little heavier with disappointment in our government and your mind preparing for a steely resolve to change what you can in your own life.

Food, Inc. was nominated for best documentary but lost out to The Cove, a documentary about dolphin hunting. At the time I didn't take much note of it and didn't really care who won. But today I happened to read an article regarding the Japanese fishing village that is targeted in The Cove. It seemed to me like they went after the easiest target they could and made a documentary reviling a small village with minimal impact to the notorious whaling industry of Japan. It also turns out that the fishing village has been practicing this hunt since the 1600s. Since we are a country addicted to superficial stories it doesn't surprise me that the idiot voters of the Oscars (and most of America) would chose a film about people who killed a bunch of flipper look-a-likes over the truth about what happens in our own country every day on a scale even Orwell couldn't have imagined.

Food, Inc. is perhaps the scariest thing I've encountered since reading American Theocracy (hint: it's about more than religion). It starts with some of those wonderful numbers that people in documentaries always throw out and which invariable those on the other side say are false or skewed. Except I haven't been able to find much on the companies fighting back because, as you find out in the film, they really don't have to. Quite honestly, you don't scare them and neither does this documentary. In 1970 5 beef packing companies controlled about 25% of the beef we ate; today 4 companies control about 80% of our beef. The main reason behind this can be traced back to our love of hamburgers. In the 1950s the McDonald brothers closed their successful family restaurant, complete with roller-skating car hops, and reopened it a few months later with a new concept, the application of a factory assembly line mentality to food preparation. It spawned a hugely successful format.

Today, the McDonald's corporation is the largest purchaser of beef and potatoes in America. It also is among the leaders in purchasing chicken, pork, lettuce, tomatoes and even apples. The importance here is that McDonald's wants their food to taste the same no matter where you are and the amount they purchase allows them to dictate who they work with and how they produce their products. Then there's my beloved corn. As an Iowan I have always loved corn but I had no idea as to the extent of which corn dominates our lives.

Next time you go to the supermarket take a good look around you. About 80% of the products you see are made from corn by products. The starch in corn has been engineered to make things like ketchup, cheese, batteries, salad dressing, Coke, charcoal, diapers, Motrin and peanut butter. And then there's items like baking powder, ascorbic acid, gluten, citric acid and of course High Fructose Corn Syrup. This final product has become a staple for the industrialized food complex. But as a result of its near omnipresence we now have this wonderful little fact: 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes; in minorities it will be 1 in 2. I wonder if health care will be important to them since it will be considered a pre-existing condition rendering them basically uninsurable.

I would like to talk about the section on beef but as the film points out, in Colorado it is a felony if you are convicted of criticizing beef products under the current "veggie libel laws." Since I don't want to go to jail for bitching about beef (I did work in the meat cutting industry for a time and I also contracted a strain of e. coli as a result) and I'm not Oprah, I'll just leave it to the film. As this is a documentary I hope you'll pardon me concerning myself more with its presentation of "facts" than with its film making prowess. In a great documentary I believe the message should outweigh the delivery, a point that must have been lost on the Oscar voters.

There are an amazing number of disturbing topics in this film that will have you reviewing your eating lifestyle and carefully considering all the changes you can make in your life. I am usually hesitant to claim a film is a must see as we all have our own personal tastes in art. That doesn't apply here. Unless you are an android (I'm looking at you Graham), we're all eating the same food and the messages here are important to all of us. We have made great strides in feeding the world, but some of our decisions are putting that ability in serious question. I would love to provide more examples here and we could easily spend hours and days of posts on this topic so I urge anyone who's read this far to see this film.

I can't resist giving you one last example before you go. Have you ever heard of Monsanto? I assure you that if the anti-christ returns to this world he will be the CEO of this company. Google this company and you'll see what I mean, these are some scary bastards. It's almost bizarre that their headquartered in Creve Coeur, which in French translates to Heartbreak Ridge. They also happen to be the first company to patent life. That's correct. In the 80's they got a patent on a genetically engineered soybean seed, a practice that had previously been undertaken by agricultural colleges and considered public domain. In 1996 only 2% of soybeans were their seeds, in 2008 it was 90%.

From 1976 to 1979 Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney for Monsanto. In 1991 he wrote the majority opinion on a case that allowed companies like Monsanto to prevent farmers from saving seeds to plant the following year. Read that again. This has been the practice of humans for thousands of years now, plant seeds, see what crops grow well, save those seeds and plant them the following year. But now we have a government that's in bed with the very companies it's regulating, helping them to create a monopoly of seeds. Sleep well kiddies and try not to think about what Monsanto is up to next.