Food, Inc.

We interrupt this blog for a non-Annie post.

Has everyone seen this movie yet? If not, I really think you should. Basically this movie shows what goes on behind the scenes in the industrial food complex. I first heard about this movie during a class I was taking last fall about corporate citizenship, and a few weeks ago we watched it.

If you haven't seen it, or don't plan on seeing it, here are some summary points. Animals are treated extremely inhumane. Cows are raised in very large pens, crammed with other cows and spend all of their lives confined and covered in excrement. The farms they are brought up on are so big that they produce so much waste that the manure is toxic and put in huge pools, which then seep into the underground water tables, contaminating it. The slaughtering of cows is even more appalling. There is image after image of sick cows coated in feces being carted into the slaughter house, working their way into our food supply. Chickens. Chickens used to take about 3 mos to fully develop and now they are pumped so full of drugs that they reach adulthood in 30 days, developing so fast that they cannot even support their own weight. And the chickens on these huge factory farms are kept in dark, window-less structures for their entire lives. Pigs? You should watch the movie.

Basically the movie demonstrates how the government (lest you think it hasn't done anything for you) keeps the price of our food artificially low by subsidizing the production of corn, which is then fed to livestock. There are only a few extremely large multi-national corporations that control almost 90% of our food supply. These corporations in turn keep their farmers in a form of indentured servitude by constantly requiring new capital investments and involve the farmers continually taking out more and more debt to meet the corporations' needs. And since the farmers are in so much debt, they have no choice but to do everything the corporations tell them out of fear their contracts will be terminated and then they will be left without the means to pay their bills and provide for their family.

What can you do? A few things. The first thing is to eat less meat. If you're not swayed by the treatment of these animals, study after study has shown that diets based around plant-based food rather than animals are healthier. When you buy meat, buy organic. Organic meat is important for many reasons. Mainly, organic animals aren't pumped full of pharmaceuticals, the animals spend 2/3 of their lives out of confinement, and the animals are not fed genetically modified food.

That's all... we will return to our regularly scheduled programming momentarily...