Josiah Begin 9/10/14 Sanitation Food inc summary Food Inc. is an depth Documentary on how our food is produced and where it comes from. The sad truth is that that most people don’t know where their food comes from. The movie starts off in the marketplace with the, “pastoral fantasy” advertisement on the plastic wrapped meat and poultry of grass fed beef, happily grazing with a cowboy herding them on his horse. Creating the illusion of where the food comes from. The attention is drawn to the unnatural year round tomatoes that are picked green and sprayed with a color enhancement chemical to get redness.
Farmers are persecuted and sued for accidentally infringing on Monsanto’s seed “rights”. More than 70% of processed foods on American shelves contain genetically modified ingredients. Can you believe that meats and milk from cloned animals will soon be on American food shelves? Cheap genetically modified corn is fed to cows, chickens and even farmed salmon. More than 30% of America’s land base is planted with corn.
Food Inc. is a documentary that reports the inside story of America’s food industry. Food Inc. does a tremendous job of brining to light what industries are trying to keep hidden. The facts revealed through this documentary are eye opening and should be used to drive change in lives and in America’s food industry. Animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs are treated cruelly in the food industry. Chickens, for instance, are raised and slaughtered in half the time they were fifty years ago; but these chickens are raised bigger.
Adding in additional substances to the cows corn diet, such as remnant cow parts, has led to e-coli out breaks in humans and continued to spread mad cow disease. One such victim of e-coli poisoning was Kevin Kowalcyk at the age of two. He ingested e-coli O 157 H7 in a contaminated hamburger he ate in 2001; which developed into hemolytic-uremic syndrome and resulted in his death twelve days later. Unfortunately the beef was not recalled until 16 days after his death. This was probably due to the fact that cattle at CAFO’s spend all their time held up in concentrated pens standing in their own feces.
This causes them to grow heavier faster. They are slaughtered when they meet the size the machines built for such require. 3. How was Joel Salatan’s Polyface Farm different from a CAFO? The Polyface Farm differed in what Joel fed his cattle.
This is a problem that big corporation farms do not have because they can just hire someone to have that job of filling out the paper work. The question which the movie presents is why the USDA is trying to make it so hard for small farmers to be efficient and prosper. The first story in the movie is about a family who raised sheep in Vermont. The USDA monitored their farm for months which in the process spent more than $1 million dollars. Finally one day they came and ceased the animals from the farm and took them out to Iowa and killed the sheep for a disease that to this day does not exist.
Once you start doing that the cows that are being eaten are the sickly one or the one’s who die on the farm and are sent to a rendering plant to be made into a powder mix that is in turn feed right back to the livestock. If the animal used to make the powder was a infected animal then the animal who consumes that animal will become sick also which in turn causes the meat we will be eating to become tainted. We still don’t know of the far reaching effects to eating a cow that’s infected with some sort of disease, scientist are just now starting to link Alzheimer’s disease and dementia to possible side effect to meat consumption. And what was once an honorable profession being a farmer is now nothing more than an assembly line of death and disease, if we don’t change something and fast we wont even be able to feed our growing population by the mid 2000 because over 50 percent of our farm land is being used just to feed our livestock for human consumption. The feed to meat ratio is way out of whack it takes 50pounds of feed to produce one pound of meat, at that rate we will never have enough crops to feed the worlds people and our food supply.
As consumers we should have every right to know how animals are being raised. From my own experience, I never knew what the word process ever meant. Until I reached high school and saw the documentary on Food, Inc. That documentary changed my whole perspective on our food. I couldn’t tell you how disgusted, furious, annoyed and agitated I was from the look of those poor cows. This is not right.
The video then talks about the meat packing industry and how it is the most dangerous job in the world so illegal immigrants have become common. The government has started cracking down on workers not the companies so this is an ongoing process. Jumps back to the honest farmer that does it old fashioned and has him talking about how the whole system of industry will be changed from the excessive demand. The system has become very vicious and consequences for not following regulations have become so severe that the accused farmers are put out of business. The video closes with statements like buy organic and support do good farmers.
One problem coming from this is that when something goes wrong, like contamination or foodborne illnesses, it affects enormous amounts of food. The documentary showed cattle standing in their own feces and being sent to the slaughterhouse caked in it and not being washed off or even rinsed off. If workers washed off the feces or even cleaned up their holding pens this would slow down production which would cause a loss in