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Food, Inc. Summary
If you aren’t completely familiar with what it is, Food, Inc was created by documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner and narrated by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), and also features commentary from Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma).
It lifts the veil on how the nation’s food industry has been consumed by corporations and how that impacts the farms where our food comes from, the supermarkets where we buy our food, and the restaurants where we eat that food. It tackles the FDA, food safety, food production, large-scale animal processing plants, and other food matters. If you are at all concerned or curious about the state of food supply in America, you should watch Food, Inc.
The Key Takeaways from the Movie
Supermarkets and Corn
The tomatoes you buy in the grocery store are picked when green and then ripened with ethylene gas
The food industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you are eating because if you did you might not eat it—it is a world deliberately hidden from us
Most people have no idea where their food comes from (do you?)
The fact that people need to write a book (and a blog!) telling people where their food comes from shows how far removed we are
The average grocery store has 47,000 products which makes it look like there is a large variety of choices—but it is an illusion—there are only a handful of corporations (like Monsanto, Tyson, and Perdue for example) and a few major crops involved
So much of the processed food is just clever rearrangements of corn (here are just a few examples of the additives that are derived from corn: cellulose, saccharin, polydextrose, xanthan gum, maltodextrin, and my favorite—ha ha ha—high fructose corn syrup)
30% of our land base in the US is used to grow corn because thanks to government policy farmers are paid to overproduce this easy-to-store crop
Farmers are producing so much corn that food scientists had to come up with uses for it—just like some of the additives listed above
Food scientists have also spent a lot of time reengineering our foods—so they last longer on grocery store shelves and don’t get stale
At the supermarket, candy, chips, and soda are all cheaper than produce
A double-cheeseburger from McDonald’s is 99 cents and you can’t even get a head of broccoli for that price
Those snack calories are cheaper because the commodity crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans are heavily subsidized
You start feeding corn to cows, E. Coli evolves and a certain mutation occurs which is very a harmful bacteria
Animals at factory farms stand ankle deep in their manure all day long so if one cow has E. Coli others can get it too
At a slaughterhouse their hides are caked with manure and if you are slaughtering 400 cows per hour how do you keep it from spreading?
So these harmful new strains of e Coli, that didn’t use to be in the world, are now a problem
E. Coli is even in spinach and apple juice because of the runoff from factory farms
It doesn’t help that the Chief of Staff for the USDA was a former lobbyist for the beef industry
Regulatory agencies are being controlled by the very companies they are supposed to be scrutinizing
There has always been food poisoning, but food is not getting safer it is becoming more contaminated because with the bigger factories it spreads the problem far and wide
There are only 13 slaughterhouses for the majority of beef in all the US
Ground beef from the grocery store has thousands of different cows mixed up in it so the chance of one of those cows in your meat having a disease is increased
After eating hamburger contaminated with E. Coli 0157:H7 a woman’s 2-year-old son went from a perfectly healthy boy to being dead in 12 days
In the 90’s some industrial meat factories were tested for E. Coli 0157:H7 and if they failed they were supposed to be shut down—but there was not enough authority to close the contaminated plants
Some companies are now using a hamburger meat filler cleansed with ammonia hydroxide to help kill E. Coli (mmm…that sounds tasty)