Food Inc Documentary

The movie “Food Inc” explains how the changes in the food industry took place. They start off with mentioning that McDonalds was the first restaurant to launch a revolutionary concept of factory-like food preparation where the workers were taught how to do only one thing. McDonalds and other tremendous corporations control the production of such ingredients as beef, pork, lettuce, tomatoes.

Later on, the documentary tells a story of how farmers raise chickens. Carole, the farmer, calls the situation the farming industry is in right now as “not farming, but mass production.” Political and economic situation makes farmers use antibiotics, dark-tunnel non-ventilated farm houses and other features in order to stay in business. It leads to negative

consequences, such as bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics and farm animals (afterwards – humans) becoming an easy target for diseases. However, there are even more terrifying consequences from the mistakes of food industry, one case that has gotten a wide public recognition is the story of Kevin and Kevin’s law. Kevin was a two and a half year old boy who ate a hamburger and died twelve days later from E. coli. His mom, Barbara Kovalcyk created a campaign that toughened FDA regulations on American food industry by helping promote Kevin’s law. Nevertheless, fast food is becoming more and more popular in today’s society, and there are several reasons for that. As a rule, fast food is cheaper than healthy food in grocery stores. Additionally, humans are pre-wired to crave for salt, fat and sugar, making fast food the most “favorable” option. As a result, more and more people are diagnosed with type II diabetes and chronic obesity.
Another important aspect of American food industry is human resources.

NAFTA production system caused many Mexico’s farmers to go out of business, and American food corporations opened their doors for farmer immigrants from Mexico that couldn’t find jobs elsewhere. Today illegal immigrants who work for those corporations are being persecuted, but corporations are left with no attention. Not all the corporations are bad though, such companies as Stonyfield, a large producer of yogurt, use ecologically clean resources and have decent company policies. Walmart is trying to keep up with a new wave of ecologically clean produce as well. Meanwhile, there is an explanation why many other stores prefer selling processed foods. The farmers that are supposed to provide stores with fresh produce are forced to go out of business because they can’t protect themselves from the influence of agricultural corporations that sell seeds. It is a norm now, that when someone genetically modifies a crop, they own it. This is why today many farmers are prohibited from saving their own seeds. Monsanto is one of the largest agricultural companies that produces the seeds and sells it to farmers. Many farmers have been sued by Monsanto for the policy violations. Such corporations as Monsanto are so powerful that they can dictate their own rules to the whole society. They may get into the lawsuits just to show the extent of their

power.
The topics that have been touched in the documentary were not new to me since I was interested in how the system works before; however, I did not know how inter dependable are all the links of American food production and how much they affect each other. I agree that the large conglomerates and corporations sometimes are more protected by the government than regular people. It is wrong, indeed, but in order to fix this issue the awareness of such problems should be raised. Even though in today’s society the information is easily accessible, not many people choose to spend their free time looking into how the food they eat is made. Furthermore, people are not able to look deeper and understand what causes the massive change in a food production. For instance, NAFTA, as a trade agreement, has changed American and even Mexican food forever (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/02/13/385754265/how-nafta-changed-american-and-mexican-food-forever) Whether those changes are positive or negative is an arguable issue. On one hand, NAFTA has significantly increased economic integration among North American countries. On the other hand, the influence of the US food production model had an effect on food production in Mexico, bringing more and more highly processed foods to the country.
To conclude, it is worth to say that economic and political systems affect food production worldwide and studying those factors is even comparable to studying ecology. Ecology is a science that deals with the relations of organisms to one another, and, when studying food production, it is clear that it is affected by economic and political situation in the country. Today the mass food production requires less human effort and more technology and science advancement, and it allows large corporations to dictate the rules to the whole consumer society.