My Thoughts on “Food, Inc.”
Below, is a trailer on a new independent film called, “Food, Inc.” and I was lucky enough to be invited to a screening of this movie last night.
The movie was based on the commercialization of our food and focused on the American food supply chain without much mention of the situation in other countries. It covered topics as parts explaining seeds, meat, produce, fast food, disease and other issues all centered around how we get our food today. To be honest, it wasn’t anything that I wasn’t already aware of and I won’t be adding any spoilers but I had some thoughts after seeing this movie that I wanted to discuss.
First of all, I spent a large part of my childhood years on a farm in central Florida (just south of Georgia). Our family has a dairy farm with over 2,000 cows. We also had a dozen horses, 10-50 bulls, some pigs and even a goat. I grew up riding horses and feeding cows but there was another aspect of this that really shaped my life and how I consume food. I was there for every step of the food process. For a while, we had some beef cows and to this day I honestly don’t know the difference between dairy and beef cows aside from one is black & white and the other is brown. I was there when a baby calf was pulled using a pulley system from its mother’s uterus. The pulley system was used because streroids made the babies too large for most births.
I was there when the small cattle was left in cages and you’d come by with a bottle to feed them milk and clean them up and I was there when the baby was either sold or introduced in with the rest of the herd. One day, that female cow would be artificially inseminated with cow sperm that was frozen in liquid nitrogen. The process involved this plastic glove that covered your whole arm, putting that arm inside of the cow and then placing the seminal fluid inside the cow. Once the baby was born, that cow would give milk for 18 months (I think) and then that cow was putting into a “dry pasture” where it waited a few months before being impregnated again. It was a cycle that went on for years until that cow was killed or died naturally and yes there was “cow graveyard” that you could smell for miles.
I was there when we harvested our own corn, fed it to the cows and sometimes we’d actually buy cows from Pennsylvania that would arrive by truck and you had to use a “hot shot” which is an electric pole to get the cows where you want them to go. When cows got sick, I helped the vet and when cows died, I used the front end loader to pick them up and move the cow to the graveyard. It was fun, interesting and exciting but I also saw the demands of the industry on my family and how more output forced us to grow and expand until the dairy was a 24 hour operation with milking going on 24/7 (even holidays) and “legal” immigrant workers from Mexico did most of the work, which by the way is when I fell in love with Mexican food. There’s nothing better than lamb meat cooked in a 10 foot deep pit on top of a home made corn tortilla with habanero peppers and rice.
Across from our farm was 8 chicken houses all owned by Tyson chicken and the stench you’ll never forget. That farmer expressed to my grandfather just how much the industry was changing and how demanding Tyson was for more volume, larger chickens and more of them and he profits actually decreased as chickens had more health problems from the steroids and horrible living conditions.
I know this post is completely out of the ordinary from my normal talk of social media but I really value that time I spent as a kid on the farm. It was fun, exciting and real and I remember seeing cows being butchered (the old fashion way) when I eat a hamburger but what I wasn’t expecting in this movie is how it is done now. Thirteen plants in the US produce 90% of the hamburger meat we consume. Thousands of cows are shipped in and forced into the pit (even if they can’t walk from disease) and all of the meat is ground up and pressed in plastic for consumption. This system was invented simply out of demand. Americans want more meat and they don’t want to pay for it and that’s how we get to the situation today.
The same goes for seeds. A company makes a pesticide that kills insects and bacteria but it also makes the soybeans fatal so they engineer a soybean that isn’t affected by the pesticide so now you have to buy the pesticide and the seed from the same company. What wasn’t surprising but still amazing was that those in Washington who make the laws to protect us from corporations are the same people advising the bad guys. The guy that basically runs the FDA was once working for the largest meat company in America. it’s amazing and a bit scary.
The solution? The movie lays it out in plain sight.
Following these steps will make you healthier and enrich your life and you don’t have to see the movie to understand and embrace these very simple steps.
