Hw - 10 Food Inc. Response

Food Inc. is a documentary by Robert Kenner who presents a main focus of how large food industries are corrupt. In the documentary which discusses industrialization of food products that affect our daily lives and especially our health, the theories about the rise in obesity, diabetes, salmonella and E Coli are linked back to what is being manufactured in our large food company plants and then being sold off to large fast food companies that we as customers consume. The processed food consist of animals being injected with hormones and chemicals to increase the growth and moderate size to create mass production. Some of the animals, especially cows are fed not grass but genetically engineered corn and grains to increase their size making them fatter later on to be slaughtered and processed as genetically engineered meat. Even though many health violations are shown in this film, a lot of the government turned their heads at this point proving themselves powerless to make a change in how the workers were being treated and how the food was being made. The only thing the government did for these large food corporations were keeping the public eye in the dark about what was actually going on. In the film they showed how agribusiness interest lobbied the CA state to keep labels off meat that came from cloned animals and they're excuse for doing that was "it would create unnecessary fright."

Eric Schlooser's, Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's, The Omnivore's Dilemma presents a certain detail without image that is more descriptive than what the film surfaces. In Fast Food Nation, Schlosser explained more about how illegal and female workers in plants were treated unfairly by the managers and that if you were injured in the plant, going to the hospital would result in you loosing your job. The film briefly describes how illegal workers made up a lot of what was being done in the plants but was more focused on the animals were treated.

From the film, one of the more powerful emotional scenes that stuck with me was the mother of the child who got E Coli and later died in result of what Food processing plants had to be blamed for. Even after the huge recall in nations history for E Coli in the meat, the complaint the mother had made was finally answered after 25 millions pounds of meat was consumed after 35 million pounds of ground beef had been recalled. This made me wonder how much our government or the large food corporations actually cared about american citizens and the thought that money weighed more in the decision of recalling meat that was infected with E Coli. Another quote from the film that stuck with me was that "Food has changed more in the past 50 years then in the last 10,000 years." Why hasn't there been a movement to change again? If we could alter the way we eat so drastically in the past 50 years, we should be able to make it possible to drastically change it again?