Would you rather have food available for everyone with the possibility of diseases or having a possible food shortage, but the food will be safe to eat? How about changing the way food is produce or keeping it the same? In the film Food Inc., Robert Kenner tires to answer these conversational questions by examining corporate farms across America. Kenner shows the industrial production of meat where some people are okay with feeding animals antibiotics while others are not because it causes the meat to be unhealthy. The problem that arises is whether or not the mass production of food is abusive for the animals causing the food to become unhealthy. If this is true and the mass production of is abusive and makes the food unhealthy then the Food …show more content…
Some people may argue that the mass production of food is the only way to feed all of the people in the United States and they would rather say that the food in healthy so everyone would have access to food. On the other hand the abuse of animals and the safety of your food does hand in hand; if there is a poor treatment of animals then you can not expect your food to be healthy. In Food Inc. the cow industry was shown as the industry that was most unhealthy and it was not the fact that multiple cows make up a single hamburger, it was the threat of E. coli that made it unhealthy. Cows naturally have E Coli in their stomachs, but because of the mass production of cows, it caused more E Coli to grow in their stomachs. Like chickens, cows are fed feed that is not supposed to be in their diet just to make them grow fast. Cows who are natural herbivores are fed corn instead of grass by corporate farms, mostly because it is cheap, but corn causes more E. coli to grow in their stomachs. E.coli is then transmitted to humans by ingesting cow meat like hamburgers that has been infected by E. coli. In a study done by the Center for Disease Control has concluded that 73,000 people in the United States will get sick from E. coli alone in a year. Michael Pollan from Food Inc. showed how dangerous corn was to cow's diet by saying “ if we took cows off of a corn diet for five …show more content…
People think that since the FDA is a government organization then it has to be aware and fix these problems. Also they think that they FDA would be more strict on the corporate farms then the small farms.The abuse of animals and the safety of your food does hand in hand; if there is a poor treatment of animals then you can not expect your food to be healthy. In Food Inc. the cow industry was shown as the industry that was most unhealthy and it was not the fact that multiple cows make up a single hamburger, it was the threat of E. coli that made it unhealthy. Cows naturally have E Coli in their stomachs, but because of the mass production of cows, it caused more E Coli to grow in their stomachs. Like chickens, cows are fed feed that is not supposed to be in their diet just to make them grow fast. Cows who are natural herbivores are fed corn instead of grass by corporate farms, mostly because it is cheap, but corn causes more E. coli to grow in their stomachs. E.coli is then transmitted to humans by ingesting cow meat like hamburgers that has been infected by E. coli. In a study done by the Center for Disease Control has concluded that 73,000 people in the United States will get sick from E. coli alone in a year. Michael Pollan from Food Inc. showed how dangerous corn was to cow's diet by saying “ if we took cows off of a corn diet for
...in the market. Diversified mid-sized family farms used to produce most of our meat, but now, only a few companies control the livestock industry. This has resulted in driving family farmers out of the market and replacing them with massive confined feeding operations that subject the animals to terrible living conditions that subject our food to contamination. Major food corporations are only concerned with minimizing overhead in order to deliver the consumer cheap food, regardless of the health implications.
Moreover, this system of mass farming leads to single crop farms, which are ecologically unsafe, and the unnatural treatment of animals (Kingsolver 14). These facts are presented to force the reader to consider their own actions when purchasing their own food because of the huge economic impact that their purchases can have. Kingsolver demonstrates this impact by stating that “every U.S. citizen ate just one meal a week (any meal) composed of locally and organically raised meats and produce, we
FOOD Inc. is a film that goes deeper into the food that we consume every single day, and also gives us insight on the origin of our food from the average farmer to the corporations that have almost made a monopoly in agriculture. However, Robert Kenner exposes the corrupt ways food companies treat animals and the way food is being produced, and overall, the need to make our voices heard that we need to make a change when it comes to what we eat and how we eat. Therefore I agree with the documentarian on his point of view on the way animals are being treated, the way our food is really being made, our health, and its effect on our lives.
In the documentary, Food Inc., we get an inside look at the secrets and horrors of the food industry. The director, Robert Kenner, argues that most Americans have no idea where their food comes from or what happens to it before they put it in their bodies. To him, this is a major issue and a great danger to society as a whole. One of the conclusions of this documentary is that we should not blindly trust the food companies, and we should ultimately be more concerned with what we are eating and feeding to our children. Through his investigations, he hopes to lift the veil from the hidden world of food.
The article highlights and includes the documentary Food, Inc. which exposes the inability of the profit system to provide safe and healthy food for the vast majority of the population. Eric Schlosser investigating journalist quotes, “The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines where animals and the workers are being abused, and the food has become much more dangerous in ways that are deliberately hidden from us”. Schlosser also quotes, “Birds are now raised and slaughtered in half the time they were 50 years ago, but now they’re twice as big”. He believes they not only changed the chicken, but they changed the farmer implying that capitalism has taken the place for the need of small scale farming. In addition, Michael Pollan also a journalist believes that the vast array of choices which appears in everyday supermarkets is nothing but an “illusion of diversity”. The advancement of technology and how consumers react to products has been further developed and continues to be in this generation. Food scientists are now genetically modifying and engineering products to satisfy and manipulate consumers to desire more of these unhealthy product choices. The biggest advance in recent years has
We should be concerned about the health of the animals that we are eating because if they are not consuming any healthy food we will not get our required nutrients. In the movie Food Inc. it shows how cows are only supposed to eat grass which is essential to them however we are now feeding them corn which makes the cows bigger and fatter faster than usual but there are many things wrong with it. This could cause Cows to raise the acid level this also creates existence for the dangerous disease E. Coli. E. Coli is a bacteria that is inside your intestines that helps you break down food. When cows are fed corn it also decreases the healthy acids such as Omega-3 and increases Omega-6 which is unhealthy. We should also care about their living conditions because a cow is in one area for most of the day just eating corn and when cows eat corn they tend to poop a lot. It is crowded in the eating area for cows so when they poop it falls on the ground and they eat so much corn that they just keep pooping so eventually they start stepping in it and this would cause them to get diseases. Some farmers when they slaughter them they do check for diseases but some don’t, so the diseases travel with the cow and onto your dinner plate which means that you could be eating an infected cow without knowing it. This could give you diseases and it could cause death. In Food Inc. they showed an example of a boy called Kevin who died because of consuming some unsanitary meat. He got E. Coli and died 12 days later. This proves that this should not be taken lightly because many people die from diseases similar to this one.
This then brings up the issue of how our food is much worse than we had originally believed. Bryan Walsh, writer for TIME, wrote the article, The Real Cost of Cheap Food, “To stay and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can further damaging consequences for humans” (Walsh 34). From the chickens to the cows, animals are kept in “prison-like conditions” that causes them to become very sick (Walsh 34). To prevent animals from getting extremely sick to the point where they die before it’s their time, farmers feed them antibiotics. Not only are the animals eating corn and antibiotics, but so are we. We are eating so much more than we ever asked for. I’ve never asked to have antibiotics in my hamburger, and I’m sure many others haven’t either, however, that is the price we ought to pay for our cheap food. Not only must we ask ourselves if we are healthy, but now we must ask ourselves if what we are eating is also eating
To give background on the FDA and USDA for better understanding the USDA is responsible for meat and poultry, while the FDA is responsible for dairy, seafood, and vegetables. The USDA was founded in 1862 to encourage food creation in the United States (Sherrow 15). Dr. Peter Collier was the first person to suggest rules and laws for the safety of our food (Sherrow 15). Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act in 1890. The Act made the USDA inspectors inspect all pig products (Sherrow 15). In 1906 the Comprehensive Meat Inspection Act was passed. The act assigned inspectors from the UDSA to the United States’ 163 slaughter houses. In the slaughter houses the meat needed to be inspected before and after slaughter (Sherrow 15-16). The FDA is also responsible for protecting food from terrorists and anyone who wants to try to harm the public (Wilson). The FDA oversees 167,000 farms in the United States and 421,000 worldwide farms. The FDA only has 1,100 inspectors to inspect those farms (Wilson). The number of inspections done by the FDA went from 4,573 in 2005 to 3,400 in 2006 (Sherrow 34). According to the Center of Science in the Public Interest the FDA has no authority for prev...
And that cause is food safety, especially in meat-packing plants. Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, has brought to light how disgusting the meat-packing industry is. (Document D). I would like to further these findings by either shutting down these companies completely or reforming them to be healthier, safer. Food is literally scraped off the floor, covered in rat dung and dirt, and placed through a processing machine where from there it is packaged and shipped out to people nationwide. (Document D). Fixing this problem will first and foremost, keep people from getting sick and possibly dying. It will also fix the health of the workers because working in those conditions cannot be healthy, for anyone
American society has grown so accustomed to receiving their food right away and in large quantities. Only in the past few decades has factory farming come into existence that has made consuming food a non guilt-free action. What originally was a hamburger with slaughtered cow meat is now slaughtered cow meat that’s filled with harmful chemicals. Not only that, the corn that that cow was fed with is also filled with chemicals to make them grow at a faster rate to get that hamburger on a dinner plate as quickly as possible. Bryan Walsh, a staff writer for Time Magazine specializing in environmental issues discusses in his article “America’s Food Crisis” how our food is not only bad for us but dangerous as well. The word dangerous could apply to many different things though. Our food is dangerous to the consumer, the workers and farmers, the animals and the environment. Walsh gives examples of each of these in his article that leads back to the main point of how dangerous the food we are consuming every day really is. He goes into detail on each of them but focuses his information on the consumer.
Society tends to associate propaganda films with issues such as Nazi Germany and their film messages for their country; however, it is also possible for small independent companies, groups of like-minded people and individuals to use the media of film to incorporate messages for our society (The Independent, 2010). These messages are often in relation to changes that individuals should make in order to improve the standards by which they live their lives and changes to everyday habits that will benefit the individual, the individual’s family, a group of individuals or even a single person (Barnhisel and Turner, 2010).
Our current system of corporate-dominated, industrial-style farming might not resemble the old-fashioned farms of yore, but the modern method of raising food has been a surprisingly long time in the making. That's one of the astonishing revelations found in Christopher D. Cook's "Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis" (2004, 2006, The New Press), which explores in great detail the often unappealing, yet largely unseen, underbelly of today's food production and processing machine. While some of the material will be familiar to those who've read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or Eric Schlosser's "Fast-Food Nation," Cook's work provides many new insights for anyone who's concerned about how and what we eat,
One of the important things that they talked about in the documentary was the lack of safety inspections being performed by the U.S.D.A and because of that, cases of salmonella have increased exponentially. Based on the documentary “Food Inc” “in 1972, the FDA conducted 50,000 food safety inspections, in 2006 they conducted 9,164.” Another thing that was talked about in the the video was that the animals are forced to wade around through ankle high manure for days on end until they are brought to slaughter. They are also forced to subsist on a corn only diet. This is due to the fact corn is subsidized by the US government and it is cheaper to feed animals while also fattening them up at the same time. Cows are not biologically designed to live off corn; their diet should consist of only grass. Research shows this change of diet is causing a mutated strain of e.coli to form in the cow’s stomach that is acid resistant. This strain of E.coli is known as 0157:H7 that was stated in the movie (Food
The way that our society has been able to produce food has changed in the last fifty years that the several thousand years beforehand. Robert Kenner addresses problems of our society’s food system and how there is only a handful of large corporations that have basically taken over the food system in the United States in the film Food, Inc. Large businesses have been able to significantly produce vast amounts of food and set low prices for consumers, usually because of government subsidies, which results in enormous profit and greater control of the food supply sources. This leads to negative health, safety, and economic consequences. This documentary examines the exercises of the few large food corporations from the start of production
Many consumers and farmers have discovered that living in an industrialized culture where the focus has become faster, bigger, and cheaper is not the best way to produce our food. Obsessed with productivity, the agriculture industry is reaping the negative consequences of creating an unsustainable environment for food production. Time and time again, the media captures stories regarding deadly bacterial contamination and dangerous pesticide contamination causing illness and death in our communities. The environment is also damaged and contaminated. This devastating trend, due to irresponsible farming practices as a result of the industrialization of the food industry, has become all too common.