Health, Taken Seriously

I just saw an early showing of the movie Food, Inc. last night and it was amazing.  The movie features various segments discussing the industrialization of our food.  It features significant interviews from the author of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma/In Defense of Food.  It shows clips inside chicken houses, meat packing plants, and farms.  Here are some startling facts from the film:

• Our food supply has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.
• In 1996, 2% of soybeans grown in the U.S. were genetically modified.  In 2008, 90% were.
• One corporation, Monsanto, owns the patent to all those genetically modified seeds.  Farmers are not allowed to save seeds for the next season (which farmers have done for thousands of years) and must purchase them new each year.  If one of Monsanto’s 75 investigators finds farmers saving seeds, or finds Monsanto’s patented seeds growing on their land, the farmer is prosecuted.
• 70% of processed foods contain genetically modified ingredients.  They do not have to be labeled to tell you so, out of the industry’s fear that this would alarm consumers before industry has had a chance to demonstrate their safety.  Before!
• The CDC estimates that 75 million Americans are sickened, 325,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die each year from foodborne illnesses.
• Pastured cattle (grass-fed) do not contain E. Coli bacteria in their guts.  This is a product of feeding them corn, something cows were not designed to tolerate.  The corn diet produces E. Coli bacteria in the cow’s rumen, which then contaminates the cattle feces.  In factory farms, cattle stand several inches deep in their own manure.  It’s nearly impossible to keep any E. Coli contamination–if it exists– in the manure off their fur, off their carcases, and out of our food supply.
• Our judicial system has decided that the USDA does not have the authority to close down meat processing plants that repeatedly produce contaminated food, such as hamburger meat containing E. Coli.
• The industry’s solution to tainted meat is a new technical process–an ammonia bath.  That’s right, your ground beef now undergoes a bath in the toxic chemical ammonia to kill potentially dangerous bacteria.
• The average food product travels 1500 miles to reach you.  This means that food transportation produces more than 30,000 tons of greenhouse gases every year.
• In Jan 2008, the FDA approved the sale of meat and milk from cloned livestock, despite the fact that Congress voted twice in 2007 to delay the FDA’s decision on cloned animals until additional safety and economic studies could be completed.
• It used to take 3 months to raise a chicken.  Now we do it in 49 days, thanks to growth hormones in the chickens’ feed.  Some chickens grow to such unnatural sizes that they can’t walk more than a few steps at a time.
• Approximately 10 billion animals (chickens, cattle, hogs, ducks, turkeys, lamb, sheep) are raised and killed in the US annually.  Nearly all of them are raised on factory farms under inhumane conditions.

Several books describe factory farming practices in painful detail, but there’s something different about seeing it in a film.  What the U.S. does for the sake of cheap meat, dairy, and eggs is appalling.  And what the industry does to keep Americans in the dark about what’s really going on their food is unacceptable.  See this film.  Become informed.  And vote with your money each time you’re at the grocery store.  If Walmart decided to stop selling dairy from cows treated with rBGH (synthetic growth hormones) in response to consumer demand, than what you buy does matter.  Industry will respond to consumer desires.  Change is possible.  If you want it, then don’t support the companies that sell you factory farmed meat or genetically modified foods.  I hope this film can do for food what The Inconvenient Truth did for global warming.