Every once in awhile, farmers go to town. Saturday, it was both literally and figuratively for us. The literal town was San Francisco for the premier of the new film, Food Inc. And figuratively, we joined a whole theater of people “going to town” about the food crisis.
What food crisis, you ask? I’m not surprised, because it seems that every week there’s a new scare about food and its contaminants, from E. coli O157:H7 to Salmonella to Streptococcus A to . . .
Food Inc. shows us why. It is an eye-popping look behind the “veil” of the food industry, where nearly every product on supermarket shelves contains high-fructose corn syrup or soy. Why? Because those two commodities – corn and soybeans – are controlled by the USDA and farmers are paid money to overproduce it, thanks to the Farm Bill. It is cheap, readily available, and deadly. More than half – that’s right, half – of California’s school children are obese. Here is the report for Sonoma County (http://www.sonoma-county.org/health/prev/heal.htm). For the first time in recent history, the life expectancy of children today will be less than that of their parents, largely due to health risks associated with overweight and obesity. And the culprit is high-fructose corn syrup in everything from bread to pasta sauce to Coke.
Do I sound angry? You bet!
So is Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and co-producer of Food Inc. After the film Saturday, he stood up from his seat in the front row to address us and answer questions. The woman behind me was one of the first to ask a question. She was there with her young daughter, who kept saying things throughout the film like, “Mommy, that’s YUCKY!” and “This movie SCARES me.” (This is NOT a movie to take kids to, no matter how enlightened a parent you are. It IS scary.) The mother asked what she could do about her daughter’s school that would not allow her to send food from home because she was on the subsidized school lunch program. “They feed my daughter hot dogs and pizza! I work really hard to feed my daughter healthy stuff at home – why can’t her school?” That’s our government at work again, folks.
So many other images from the film, all of which demand that we do something:
Farms forced to house chickens in massive henhouses only to watch them become deformed from force-feeding antibiotic-laden corn to fatten them for market in a record 48 days with breast meat that is twice the size of normal chickens. The free-range initiative passed in Sonoma County does nothing to change this – only getting rid of the massive subsidies for corn will. And demanding (and paying more for) local chicken from humane farms.
Eighty percent of the meat in the US is produced by just four companies. If you think they treat animals or workers as anything but another line on the balance sheet, watch this movie. If you think what is shrink-wrapped and available in the meat case at the local supermarket is cheap, watch this movie.
Genetically modified seeds are everywhere already. (Have you ever taken your kids to the corn maze just of 101 in Petaluma? Curious why there are no weeds in the corn patch? GMO RoundUp Ready Corn from Monsanto is the magic answer!)
I sincerely hope you can see this movie. And I sincerely hope it can do for the food industry what An Inconvenient Truth did for global warming: at least we’ll all know.
