Reconsidering Our Plate: Reflection of Food, Inc. "Food, Inc." is an interesting documentary that digs deep into the confusing web of the modern food industry, unraveling its complexities and shedding light on its often overlooked consequences. This movie exposes the harsh realities of industrialized food production, revealing the hidden costs to both human health and the environment. At the heart of "Food, Inc." lies the truth of how the industrial food system prioritizes profit over the well-being of people, animals, and the planet. Through powerful visuals, this movie highlights the practice of factory farming, genetic modification, and corporate control within the food industry. It showcases how these practices not only ruin the quality
Food Inc. is a documentary displaying the United States food industry in a negative light by revealing the inhumane, eye opening, worst case scenario processes of commercial farming for large corporate food manufacturing companies. Food Inc. discusses, at length, the changes that society and the audience at home can make to their grocery shopping habits to enable a more sustainable future for all involved.
Alice Waters, in her 2007 article “Farmer Bill Should Focus on Healthful Foods”, instead of focusing on the farming techniques themselves, makes a more pointed inspection over the products and produce
Hungry for Change is the recent documentary by the nutritional-consultants-turned-directors James Colquhoun and Laurentine ten Bosch. This duo, along with producer Enzo Tedeschi, are the minds behind Food Matters, another trouped film denouncing modern diets. Hungry for Change sets out to achieve more than prior films in this sub-genre of documentaries by offering a supposed ‘solution’ to the many issues that are brought up.
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
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.
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,
“Food as thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating,” is an article written by Mary Maxfield in response or reaction to Michael Pollan’s “Escape from the Western Diet”. Michael Pollan tried to enlighten the readers about what they should eat or not in order to stay healthy by offering and proposing a simple theory: “the elimination of processed foods” (443).
Richard Balko and Mary Maxfield discuss personal responsibility, and choices in one’s health in their essays “What You Eat Is Your Business,” and “Food as Thought: Resisting the Moralization of Eating” respectively. Balko feels the government should not intervene in people’s food intake because it is an individual preference. Instead, Balko asserts that the government should foster a program to assist the American people to take on personal responsibility and ownership of their own health. Similarly, Maxfield paints the same picture that our culture now finds it immoral to eat what our body needs, therefore believing in the idea of eating less is healthier. Maxfield points out the multi-billion dollar campaign of corporations into advertising false hope into consumers by buying into eradication of fatness. Why has food have suddenly become a risky subject at the dinner table? And who is to blame? Is it everyone else or do we blame ourselves?
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
During my observation in Mrs. Herd’s class I taught a phonemic lesson to the students. The phonemic lesson I chose for Mrs. Herd’s class was rhyming. During this lesson I taught the students how to identify rhyming words and how to rhyme with the ending sound /at/. The students will benefit from this lesson by gaining the ability to recognize and generate rhyming words. The strategy I used for this lesson is called “The Hungry Thing”. In this strategy the teacher reads a book to the students called The Hungry Thing by Jan Slepian and Ann Seidler.
In the article “The End of Food,” Lizzie Widdicombe describes an advancement of our food culture through a new product developed by three young men living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. After failing to produce new inexpensive cellphone towers on a hundred seventy thousand dollar investment, the three men went on to try and develop software with their remaining funding. While trying to maximize their funding’s longevity, they realized that their biggest budget impediment was food. In fact, it reached the point where their diet comprised of mostly fast food, and eventually they despised the fact that they had to spend so much time and money on eating. Due to this hardship, Rob Rhinehart, one of the entrepreneurs, came up with the
As obesity and medical problems due to diet become a larger issue within society, it is imperative to educate humans on the importance of maintaining a healthy diet. This is exactly what Hungry for Change does. One of the key points made in the documentary is that humans no longer eat a natural diet like their ancestors did; when humans first began to inhabit the Earth they lived off a diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats. During these periods famine and disease was rampant, so humans adapted to store nutrition more productively. Now that humans live in a more developed society, they have a (practically) unlimited supply of food. However, much of this food is processed and manipulated to have a better flavour and a longer shelf life, and though this sounds like a positive situation, it has become a huge problem. According to best-selling women’s health author Dr. Christine Northrup, “We’ve lived on Earth for a millennium where there was a food shortage. You’re programmed to put on fat whenever there is food available. Now there’s a lot of food available, but it’s the wrong kind.” (Northrup, as cited in Colquhoun et al., 2012). This is a logical and widely accepted theory as to why humans continue to overindulge on foods despi...
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
For Etkind, historicism is a tradition that seeks to understand the current state of the world as a result of its development in the past and denies other ways of understanding the present (such as free will) (Etkind, “Warped Mourning”). Magical historicism emerges from the “instructive imagery that has evolved out of post-catastrophic, post-Soviet culture” (Etkind, “Magical Historicism” 632), which, like post-traumatic consciousness, “cyclically returns to the overwhelming event in the past” (Etkind, “From Fiction to Non-Fiction” 2). The imaginative figures, places and metamorphoses in magical historicism are the result of the attempt to understand “the central trauma, or rather the catastrophe, of the Soviet period (Etkind, “From Fiction to Non-Fiction” 2). The distinctive traits of magical historicism are uncanny landscapes, zombies, walking animals, mutations of and manipulations with human bodies, contact with supernatural, discovery of knowledge that leads to superpower (Etkind, “Warped Mourning”).
This book is a life changing book. It was inspirational, informative and gave you insight about the things we do not know about the food we eat. The documentary was graphic and detailed, informing you of the process from the farm or the fields, to the manufactures, to the labeling and packaging companies. It informed me, about the school lunches, how some of the meals at school are made, to the politics behind it. This book is also a collectible.