Faster, Fatter, Bigger, Cheaper...

July 5, 10:58 PMLA Asian American Movie ExaminerEd Moy

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The words faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper might best summarize America's mentality when it comes to food according to the new documentary Food, Inc.

The film asks viewers "How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?"

It points out that although "our food appears the same—a tomato still looks like a tomato—it has been radically transformed."

In Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry -- "an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and our own environment."

Using a combination of animation, graphics and video footage, the filmmakers attempt to expose the highly mechanized, "Orwellian underbelly that’s been deliberately hidden from the American consumer. They reveal how a handful of corporations control our nation’s food supply."

According to the filmmakers, although companies try to maintain the myth that our food still comes from farms with red barns and white picket fences, our food is actually raised on massive “factory farms” and processed in mega industrial plants. The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them.

The film goes to great lengths to explain that something as seemingly innocent as tomatoes are being bred to be shipped without bruising and to stay edible for months through genetic modification of the seeds.

"The enormous buying power of the fast food industry helped to transform the entire food production system of the United States," Schlosser points out. "So even when you purchase food at the supermarket, you’re likely to be getting products that came from factories, feedlots and suppliers that emerged to serve the fast food chains."

FOOD, INC. Exclusive Clip

Although the food production system is highly productive, and Americans are spending less on food than ever before, the filmmakers show viewers what the real costs are in terms of its effects on the financial and physical health of the people involved in growing, harvesting, buying and consuming the food.

In the film, viewers are taken inside the factory-farmed meat industry where cattle are given corn-based feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest, resulting in new strains of E. coli bacteria, which sickens roughly 73,000 Americans annually.

In 1998, the USDA implemented microbial testing for salmonella and E.
coli 0157h7 so that if a plant repeatedly failed these tests, the USDA could
shut down the plant. After being taken to court by the meat and poultry
associations, the USDA no longer has that power.

It's also explained that because of the high proliferation of processed foods derived from corn, Americans are now facing epidemic levels of diabetes among adults and alarming increases in obesity, especially among children.

Surprisingly, the film reveals that all of this is happening right under the noses of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and the FDA. The filmmakers expose a “revolving door” of executives from giant food corporations in and out of Washington D.C. that has resulted in a lack of oversight and illuminates how this dysfunctional political system often operates at the expense of the American consumer.

“We reduced funding for the FDA and rely increasingly on self-policing for all of these industries, and now we just have really lost our system,” according to Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), one of the champions for food safety in D.C.

“There is this deliberate veil, this curtain that’s drawn between us and where our food is coming from. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating because if you knew, you might not want to eat it,” according to Schlosser. “Not only do they not want you to know what’s in it, they have managed to make it against the law to criticize their products … In Colorado, it’s a felony if you’re convicted under a veggie libel law. So you could go to prison for criticizing the ground beef that’s being produced in the state of Colorado. You look at the labels and you see farmer this, farmer that. It’s really just three or four companies that are controlling the meat. We’ve never had food companies this big and this powerful in our history.”

As the film takes viewers into the nation’s heartland, we hear from several farmers who were silenced by giant corporations out of  fear of retaliation and lawsuits for speaking out against using genetically modified soybean seed.

Food Inc. explains that the laws today are such that corporations are allowed to patent seeds for crops, resulting in the rise of the Monsanto company, a former chemical producer that manufactured Agent Orange and DDT.

According to the filmmakers, over a span of just 10 years, Monsanto's patented gene has now landed in 90% of the nation’s soybean seeds. In fact, farmers are now "forbidden to save and reuse these seeds and must instead buy new seed from Monsanto each season."

“I found it necessary to get up at 3 or 4 in the morning before the (private) investigators are on the road following me.” – Moe Parr, an Indiana man who was sued by Monsanto for inducing farmers to violate patents by seed cleaning – a practice utilized by farmers for thousands of years. Parr, who has been a seed cleaner for 25 years, was subsequently pushed out of the seed business.

In the film, farmers like Parr claim that Monsanto has gone as far as hiring private investigators to enforce their seed patents, spending millions every year to not only investigate, but intimidate and sue farmers -- many of whom are financially unable to fight the corporation.

Food, Inc. also introduces viewers to several courageous people who refuse to stand by and do nothing. Some, like Stonyfield Farm’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farm’s Joel Salatin, find ways to work with the system to improve the quality of food.

Others who chose to speak out in their fight against the corporations that control the food industry, include Barbara Kowalcyk, a mother whose 2 1/2 year old child Kevin died from E. coli. She became a food safety advocate and fought to give the USDA back its power to shut down plants that repeatedly produce contaminated meats.

The film also shows a glimpse of the food industries impact on minorities in America, taking viewers along for the ride as a low-income Hispanic family chooses to save money by eating fast food instead of buying healthy vegetables and fruits at the supermarket even though their father is suffering from diabetes.

Meanwhile, in another part of the country, a food company is shown to knowingly hire illegal immigrant factory workers, but only to allow those same workers to be arrested and taken away by federal authorities when the workers are no longer needed.

“All those snack food calories are the ones that come from the commodity crops, from the wheat, from the corn, and from the soybeans," according to Pollan, who also authored “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. "By making those calories really cheap, it’s one of the reasons that the biggest predictor of obesity is income level.”

Although the filmmakers made attempts to interview representatives from Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue and Smithfield regarding the claims made in the film, all the companies declined to be interviewed.

As a documentary, Food, Inc. succeeds in capturing the big picture by illustrating the dangers of a food system controlled by these powerful corporations that "don’t want you to see, to think about or to criticize how our food is made."

But ultimately, the film works best as a means to increase conversation in the general public in regards to the American food industry and its impact on citizens.  In the end viewers will walk away with a better understanding of just how complicated and compromised the process of growing crops and raising livestock to feed ourselves and our families has become.

The filmmakers remain optimistic, reminding viewers that "despite what appears to be at times a hopeless situation, each of us still has the ability to vote on this issue every day – at breakfast, lunch and dinner."

"Things can change in this country," according to Kenner. "It changed against the big tobacco companies. We have to influence the government and readjust these scales back into the interests of the consumer. We did it before, and we can do it again."

For more info:  http://www.foodincmovie.com