Movie Review: Food Inc.

This is sort of a different kind of movie for us, really more of a documentary. We watched on instant play on Netflix, so it didn't cost anything other than time. As I expected, it was littered with lots of liberal potshots, corporations are evil, George W. Bush is evil, Clarence Thomas is evil. It wasn’t as bad as some hatchet job documentaries but it had it’s moments. They kept flashing on the screen that Monsanto or Tyson declined an interview for this film. Well duh, a corporation is not going to knowingly go on camera for a hostile interview that is almost certainly going to be spun as negatively as possible.

Here is the thing. Most of what the movie said is true. The causes, conclusion and solutions maybe not, but the facts are pretty accurate. Most people would be a little disturbed to see how the food on the table got into the box they opened for dinner. Companies like Monsanto are not evil, but they are “for-profit” companies. That means that their primary concerns is…wait for it…profit. If Monsanto sinks untold millions into developing Round-Up resistant soybean seeds, you can rest assured that they are going to jealously protect that technology. If they didn’t, the board would boot management out and rightly so. Chickens, hogs and cattle are raised in highly efficient and confined systems to cram as much meat on them as quickly, uniformly and cheaply as possible. Most of the food in your grocery store that is affordable is also horrible for you, featuring loads and loads of sugars and starches which quickly turn into fat in our sedentary lifestyle. Likewise, it is probably cheaper to get a couple of items off the dollar menu at Burger King than it is to buy decent food and make a meal (plus it is a whole lot more convenient and quicker) in large part because our genius public servants in Congress constantly tinker around with the food production process and we end up paying farmers to not farm, importing apple juice from China and producing too much of some types of food and not enough of others.

So clearly there are some troubling issues in our food production system, issues most people have no idea about and frankly don’t care. All they know is that they want cheap food in convenient packages, they want fresh fruit and vegetables way out of the normal growing season, they want milk that is homogenized and less than $3/gallon and eggs for less than a buck a dozen. There are profit driven decisions, bad public policies at the federal level, razor thin margins that all but force production farms into bigger and bigger conglomerates that wipe out smaller family farms that cannot compete with these massive farms head to head.

The solution is somewhat more problematic. Merely saying “buy organic” isn’t going to solve the problem. Most of the organic food brands you see on the shelf at grocery stores are owned by one of the huge food conglomerates and they will find a way to cut costs. More of an issue is our lifestyle. There are two big stumbling blocks here.

The first is that as Americans cluster near urban areas, the ability to raise your own food is negligible. Most Americans have virtually no idea how the food they eat gets to their plate and frankly barely cares. In the event of a catastrophic interruption to our food system, lots of people would be completely lost and likely starve to death when they ran out of Kraft Dinner and Doritos.

The second is the bigger issue and it was completely glossed over in the movie. Our very way of life in 2010 precludes most people from even thinking about eating better. We have built an economy that is driven by both parents working. Along with our insanely busy lifestyles and constant entertainment, most people at least perceive that they don't have time to prepare food. What they want is cheap and easy and that is what businesses provide (because again, they are in this for profit and profit means giving consumers what they want). American society revolves around earning and consuming. We work, typically both parents working, to earn and we earn almost exclusively to consume. How in the world is a family supposed to have healthy meals when no one is home during the day? It takes me about 20 minutes to make a meal if it consists of prepared foods that I essentially heat up. If I am going to actually make a meal that requires real cooking, it takes an hour or more. I am fortunate that even though I am feeding ten people at each meal, my wife is home when I get home and I rarely get home later than 5:05. Even still we eat lots of convenience foods.

So what do we do about it? I guess we can keep eating mass-produced food. I don't have a moral qualm about that, at least from an "animal rights" standpoint. I do have concerns about it from a health standpoint. Eating lots of sugars and starches is just not good for us. We consume a ton of sugar as a family. Perhaps literally a ton. Add in all of the sweeteners in foods and the family history of diabetes on my wife's side and we are walking down the road to family gatherings revolving around shots of insulin. I am sure we would all be healthier in the long run and feel better in the short run if we got some of the junk foods and sugars out of our diet.

I would like to see us raise more of our own food as a family, because it is healthier and the process of raising food is a good character builder for the kids (and the adults!). I am not sure how to do that in the affluent suburbs we live in but that is a different issue. The moral of the story is that corporations are not evil and hogs long to dance in the fields like a scene from The Sound of Music. The moral of the story is that food, one of the basic necessities in life, doesn't magically appear in the store. Cattle ranchers don't raise meat in Styrofoam and shrink wrap. they raise cattle. We all need to pay attention to what we eat and what we feed to our families. If you think the government is a) supposed to and b) capable of guarding the food system, you are fooling yourself. They only person who can do that is you and doing so may require that you reevaluate your lifestyle. I would encourage you to watch Food Inc. if you have Netflix or can get it from the library, keeping in mind the political motivations behind it but also paying attention to the reality of how your feed your family. If nothing else, it got us thinking and that is always a good result.

(By the way, I don't really see this as a Biblical issue. There is nothing particularly righteous about eating one kind of food over another or in living an agrarian lifestyle. I do think that there are lots of benefits that come along with healthier living and an agrarian lifestyle, but that doesn't mean that someone who lives in the country is more faithful than someone who lives in the city)