Lindsey Crawford
Library 201
10 May 2010
6th Blog
Food Inc.
Food Inc. is a good flick. It is a combination of the Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. The first time I saw it, via Netflix last year, I was outraged, disturbed and shaken. Seeing how livestock, namely chickens, pigs and cows were treated on corporate farms was eye opening. Even more eye opening though was the way workers were treated: just like the animals, disposable and cheap. I found the chicken farming to be sharecropping for the 21st century. The farmer never gets ahead, just has to buy more and more infrastructure, take out more and more debt. Then on the flip side there is the grass farmer. His operation is clean, natural and the animals look happy. Yet, the reality check in all of this is that the small time grass farmer cannot feed the world unless he “scales up,” which by his own admission is not something he is willing to do because it will violate the integrity of his practice. So then this all begs the question? How can we feed the world and do so in a way that has integrity and is sustainable? Obviously the way we are doing things today has a lot of negative tradeoffs. More than 60% of the American population is either overweight or obese. Childhood diabetes is reaching epidemic proportions. Families are out of touch with each other because they don’t eat meals together. And what are the positive of this scenario? Cheap food, via corporate welfare for starters. I’m not sure what to make of it all. I’m not sure how fair and accurate Food Inc. is either. I mean, the reason we overeat sugar, salt and high fat foods is because these things are rare in nature. When we eat foods that are jacked up with them we cannot help but indulge in the sensory overload and crave more. That is something that Food Inc did not address; that is something that is usually not addressed at all in these journalistic views on eating habits. Although, Pollan did do a good job of talking about the biological want for the convenience of fast food. So I’m not sure what I am trying to say here, except that food and food habits is an extremely complex issue, one that cannot be covered in a documentary. Food Inc. did a good job waking the public up, but I wish it took things further.
Strum, Roland, “Childhood Obesity — What We Can Learn From Existing Data on Societal Trends, Part 1” Jan 2005. PubMed Central. CDC. Web 10 May 2010.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1323315/?report=abstract
I was feeling the same thing about the complete accuracy of the film. I mean they accomplished what they wanted by shocking the audience and obviously that is the only way to get people's attention, but I was kind of disappointed with the kind of surface analysis on the issue. But I guess that is the whole point, opening the eyes of the citizens so they will take action and learn more. So I am agreeing with you basically the food industry/eating habits are very complex and take more thought to try to grasp the whole thing.
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