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Food, Inc. lifts the Veil on industrialized Food
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Food, Inc. official movie poster.
Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. is a mind-blowing look at what really goes on in the kitchen.
While Food, Inc. has many disparaging things to say about industrialized food, it is the thesis of this film that major fast-food companies like Tyson and Smithfield are killing their customers.
Although the film gradually elevates to looking at bigger social-economic problems of industrialized food, it starts with contract farmers.
While fast-food companies ask that farmers borrow as much as $500,000 to build sheds with automated feeding systems for their chickens, they only pay them $18,000 annually.
Of course, if farmers refuse to erect these sheds, they’ll lose their contracts.
But if you think contractual farmers have it bad, take a look at the chickens they breed.
Inside these highly expensive, technologically advanced sheds are hundreds of screaming chickens each with less than one square foot of space. Because some chickens get too big from the growth-promoting antibiotics baked into their food, they cannot support their weight. Their legs snap, and they become immobile and eventually die.
The floors of these sheds are disgusting. They’re caked with dead chickens and feces. While the dead chickens are picked up everyday, the feces is cleaned every 18 months.
Also, these sheds are completely windowless leaving the surviving chickens in the dark for all hours of the day.
Cows and pigs are treated similarly.
Although cows are meant to eat grass, they’re forced to eat corn because it makes them bigger. When they’re shipped off to slaughterhouses, they stand crowded and screaming until finally, they’re pushed quickly and violently onto the kill floor by a big mechanical arm.
Food, Inc. utilizes shocking footage of the slaughterhouse to show its audience how our meat is truly prepared.
After the cows are dead, illegal immigrants form a kind of disassembly line around them. The cows are skinned, trimmed and stripped of their meat.
Working with blood and feces all day, these illegal immigrants – most of them recruited straight from Mexico by the food companies – are subjected to diseases and infections. Great! Now, we've got sick people in the U.S. who were never supposed to be here in the first place.
But slaughterhouse employees aren’t the only ones subjected to diseases. Since the early 90s, more and more cases of E. coli have been reported each year.
In 2001, 2-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk died after eating a hamburger contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. One of the protagonists in Food, Inc. is Kevin’s mother, Barbara, who introduced Kevin’s Law alongside House Representative, Phil English, in 2005.
Kevin’s Law was designed to strengthen the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s ability to enforce food safety and sanitation standards for meat and poultry. But what Barbara wanted most was an apology from the company that killed her son. So far, she hasn’t been able to get that. In fact, legally, Barbara cannot officially state that her son was killed by one of these companies.
One of the most interesting subjects in Food, Inc. is the power that major food companies have acquired. They’ve actually managed to make it illegal to disparage their products.
If these food companies aren’t killing their customer, they’re destroying their customer's health. They have great-tasting fatty products with unbeatable prices, and though they say that it’s up to consumers to eat responsibly, young impoverished families really don’t stand a chance.
Food, Inc. has many interesting things to say about major fast-food companies. Mostly, the film encourages audience members not to support them.
Although it's expensive to eat organic food products, Food, Inc. begs audience members not to let these major fast-food companies poison us with E. coli, intensify immigration problems, abuse farmers and torture innocent animals.
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