Eight Things Food, Inc Caused Me to Think
The other day, I watched Food, Inc. And then I watched it again. IMDB puts it better than I can, so I’ll just quote them: Food, Inc is a documentary film that provides an unflattering look inside America’s corporate-controlled food industry. The filmmaker, Robert Kenner, sets out on a fairly straight-forward mission to figure out where our food comes from. The answer he comes up with is deeply troubling. I’m not going to do a full plot synopsis or anything, so for that, I recommend just watching the movie. Instead, I want to touch on a few different things, eight to be exact, that the movie impressed upon me.
We don’t eat real food in our society. This is something I suppose I’ve always had an intuitive awareness of. I mean, you can’t grow up eating Pop-Tarts for breakfast without realizing that the stuff we put in our mouths is anything but natural. However, the extent to which our food is “not real food” is unbelievably troubling. The market has succeeded in putting a wide array of affordable and filling options in our face without anyone really stopping to ask, “should we really be eating this stuff?”
It’s all just corn. One of the more striking points in Food, Inc for me was when the narrator said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “when you go into a grocery store, it seems like you have a ton of options, but most everything is really just a clever rearrangement of corn [or soy, or both].” The film dives a little bit into the economics of corn and how farmers are basically “priced in” to growing corn because of government subsides to do so. Since corn is plentiful, corn is therefore cheap. Since it’s cheap, food manufacturers can afford to flood the market with corn-based products at a low price for consumers thereby basically “blocking” the consumer from really eating anything other than “clever rearrangements of corn.” In effect, we’re using tax dollars to make it so that the only thing it makes financial sense for us to eat is variations on corn. Do you think Joe Farmer is going to use his field to grow blueberries thereby driving down the price of blueberries when he can make significantly more money producing corn? Not a chance. Joe is only human, after all.
Greed is the main problem. The real crux of the food problem in America, and the crux of most (all?) problems for that matter, is greed. Greed is what has caused food manufacturers to put whatever cheap and tasty crap they can onto the market. They profit wildly from doing so and are able to use some of those proceeds to lobby Washington to create friendlier and friendlier laws for the industry. The FDA is in bed with American food manufacturers. It’s really little more than a front to make you feel like there’s a governing body looking out for your interests with regards to food. It might have originated with the right intent, but over time the FDA has basically sold itself out to the food industry. The food we currently eat are like what cigarettes were in the 1940s: awful for you but consumers have little access to information to help them realize this because regulators are in bed with the manufacturers too much to do anything about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot more about how greedy our culture is lately and how much we romanticize the idea of making another buck or seeing a stock price go up. But rarely do we ask, “at what cost?” In this way, we are a very foolish culture.
Poor people are screwed. People on fixed-income budgets who are living paycheck to paycheck are the real losers. They are almost certainly eating a bunch of processed crap. After all, a frozen pizza is a lot cheaper and has a lot more calories than an organic salad topped with grilled, organic chicken. What choice do you think they’re going to make? In short, people have less money than they think. People “think” they have enough to get by on what they’re currently making, but that assumes they settle for eating processed sugars, salts, and fats. Suppose these foods were no longer an option to them because they decided their health wasn’t worth selling out. They’d have no choice but to pony up a considerably more amount of money for organic, non-processed foods. On the back-end, however, they’ll recoup a lot of this money, and then some in the opinion of my friend Nat, through lowered health care costs.
We’re fat because it’s affordable to be fat. We’re fat because our policymakers and corporations have allowed a system to arise in which it is affordable to stuff your face with yummy fats, sugars, and salts. Since we naturally crave these items ahead of the spinach, and since they’re cheaper than the spinach anyway, we stuff our faces. This is why even the poor people in this country are fat. Everyone can afford to be fat because being fat has been made to be so cheap!
Non-organic meat is disturbing. No text authored by me can come remotely close to doing the scenes from Food, Inc justice. You really just have to see the film. The source of our meat in this country is just downright troubling. Take for example chicken. Chicken is healthy and yummy, right? Well because Americans like white meat, companies engineered the chickens to have breasts about twice the size as they are in nature. Additionally, since a chicken that can grow to full size in 48 days is cheaper to produce than a chicken that takes nearly twice that long to grow to full size, we figured out a way to make chickens grow so fast that their bones and joints simply cannot keep up. What does this mean for the chicken? It means that in it’s final days, the weight of its breasts is so immense that it’s underdeveloped legs don’t stand a chance. The chickens can take one, maybe two steps (not like they’ve got very much space to work with anyway) before they plop back down onto the ground waiting for death. All so we can have a big, fat, juicy chicken breast on our plate for dinner at half the cost of the organic ones that are half the size. I’ve always avoided veal since I thought it seemed pretty cruel to keep them chained to the ground. I never realized that if I applied that same logic to chickens, it would have made sense to go organic before now.
Corporations are remarkably capable. This movie really demonstrates the brilliance that companies are capable of. When left to their own devices, they are able to create jaw-dropping “optimizations” (I put that in quotes because putting a toxic chemical on something we plan to eat so that we can have more of it to eat shouldn’t really be viewed as “optimal”). What our corporate food companies have managed to do is really quite remarkable. It’s depressing and seemingly void of any ethics, but remarkable all the same. They have directly engineered an entire country full of people who unquestioningly eat stuff that they don’t even know where it came from and balloon to unparalleled sizes in the process. I mean think about that, how many of us can truly say that we’ve ever thought about where our food comes from? How many of us can honestly say that they’ve thought, “hmm, I wonder what xanthan gum is?” I know I can’t say that. Since I was a toddler until just recently, I never questioned the origins of the food I put into my mouth. I just ate without really knowing what it is. Remarkable, isn’t it? Do you think humans from a century ago could have said that?
Where corporations succeed, they also fail. When left to their own devices, corporations are only concerned with one thing: profit. Profit does not have to be an evil word, but to many people, increasingly myself, it has an evil connotation. This is because any entity concerned only with profit will do anything, including things detrimental to the health of humanity if they think they can get away with it, in order to see that “profit” number increase. Our society has become more concerned with seeing a stock price go up on one day than it is with asking if what they had to do to make that price go up actually added value to society or just stole from many to give to a few. And make no mistake, food corporations are stealing from the many, in this case, their health, in order to increase their own bottom line. Our obsession with money is literally killing us and will continue to kill us until we decide that it is not what’s most important.
Consumers are incredibly powerful. Food, Inc succeeded in restoring the viewers’ feeling of power after spending most of the film making them feel helpless and disturbed. They did this by reminding everyone that every time you scan an item at a grocery store, you are “voting” for that item. If enough of us begin to “vote” for the items that we are meant to eat, companies will get the message. The film recommends buying organic foods wherever possible, buying locally-grown foods wherever possible, and basically getting used to the idea that food is supposed to require more work than we’re used to. Food was not meant to be something we could get from a window out of our car for $1 and be full. Food is work. For the majority of human history, the majority of the work humans did was directly related to cultivating food and sustaining life. We have found a way to cheat ourselves out of having to do this work and in doing so, we’re cheating ourselves. Budget more time and money for the gathering and preparing of food. Real food.
I’ll close with two links to related stuff. First, the story of aspartame. Read that and tell me if it doesn’t make you want to burn Donald Rumsfeld at the stake. Finally, read here the text of a New York girl’s valedictorian speech from a few months back as she bashes the very system decorating her.
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As a food scientist, I should really see this movie.
Based on your comments, it sounds so insanely biased that it will probably piss me off.
I’ll just comment on a couple of things. If you think Organic chickens have smaller breasts, you’re mistaken.
Corn subsidies and other subsidies for that matter do make it so lots of things have corn derivatives in it. Blame the policy makers on that one. Sure some corporations may have nagged to make it so, but ultimately it would be congress setting that up.
Xanthan gum is great stuff, I use it all the time. It’s a polysaccharides (just like any starch) and perfectly safe. It’s derived by fermentation (like wine or beer).
Aspartame is two amino acids linked together. Amino acids linked together make protein. It’s safe. If for whatever reason you think it makes you sick, don’t eat it.
The last part says it all. Consumers vote with their money. Products that don’t sell get discontinued. Corporations make what sells. People must like processed food.
One more thing. The big evil corporation are just making what people want. This onion article sums it up quite well:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/americans-demand-crispier-outside,17881/
-d
Darryl,
Thank you for your comments. I guess it really boils down to whether or not you believe companies should be allowed to create anything they can get the consumer to buy. To me, that’s the idealogical argument in play here. Just because people like and purchase processed foods doesn’t mean it’s in their best interest to do so. Obviously there are countless examples throughout history where people purchase or consume things that are bad for them. So do you rely on the people to figure this out for themselves? Or do you expect oversight agencies to step in and make a decision in the better interest of the people? Personally, I don’t know how to answer that question.
I don’t trust the policy makers to make that decision. I’ll give you an example why. Policy makers in general try to make one size fits all diet recommendation for everyone. Take salt for example. They want to make restrictions on everyone’s sodium intake. The fact is only a very small percentage of the population would benefit from this. The remaining will get all worked up about sodium instead of getting all worked up about other nutrients (or lack of nutrients) that would actually make a difference for them.
There is more and more evidence I see everyday about how different people’s metabolism act totally different based on what they eat. So giving a one size fits all reg may work for some, but will make things much worse for others. Look at the food pyramid with all the carbs at the bottom, then look at everyone’s BMI increasing for example.
-d