Gack Yack

On the day I watched Meat Your Meat for the first time, my eating habits changed forever. I never really seriously considered becoming a vegetarian until I watched this movie. One random day in our office, a co-worker (who had recently converted to vegetarianism because of MYM) dared me to watch MYM and then eat a hamburger. No problem, I thought. Needless to say, I never made it to the hamburger, and I stopped eating meat almost immediately. It inspired me to learn more about the food I put into my body. I read Food for Life, China Study and finally The Omnivores Dilemma. I also watched in-depth documentaries, including King of Corn, Food Inc. and Earthlings. And although Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me are more popular films, neither was as influential as Meat Your Meat.

With a run-time of only about 10 minutes,  MYM is the perfect way to ruin a holiday meal. Play it for your family right after they finish mocking your meatless ways and are about to sit down to a nice turkey day meal.  Tell ‘em it’s your school project.

Oh, and you can’t beat the narration by the superbly dramatic Alec Baldwin either.

When you become a vegetarian, it’s easy to say you’re doing it for a particular cause, whether it be a healthier you, animals, or even the environment. But as I sat and watched Food, Inc. the other night, I realized that the driving factor should be the appalling behavior of our nation’s food industry.

If there’s any indication that the government has forgotten about regular people, it’s with the food industry. It’s obvious that in our rapid plunge from the top country in the world, we’ve created a lot of issues to pay for. We need to make money. But doing so at the expense of the American people is not the answer.

When I was a kid, I was always told in school that our government and all its’ regulatory agencies cared about us–that they were the watchdogs for our well-being, and I believed it. Maybe it was an antiquated notion, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Everything goes to the highest bidder now–it’s all about making money, above everything else.

To say that we consumers have been in the dark about the food in our supermarkets is a vast understatement: we’re basically clueless. We have absolutely no idea what our food goes through or how far it travels before it lands on our plates. And it’s our blind faith in the USDA and FDA that needs a rude awakening.

In Food Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner shows us just how much the food industry has been hiding from us in the last 20-30 years. As an industry that was once controlled by numerous companies, the food industry is now controlled by a handful of corporations (4 to be exact) that continuously put money ahead of consumer health and well-being. They destroy the livelihood of American farmers, expose employees to all kinds of antibiotics and contaminants, and damage the environment. They’ve remade our food in their image by making everything bigger: chickens, cows and pigs are all injected with hormones so they’ll grow faster. Corn is broken down and remade into thousands of different ingredients. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find one ingredient in the 47,000 products at a supermarket that doesn’t contain some variant of corn.

Food, Inc. gives viewers an appalling but true window into the mass production of our food. It makes insightful points about what we eat and how it’s produced. It’s also not afraid to put a spotlight on who’ve we become as a nation and where we’re going from here. I recommend this movie to anyone curious or that cares about where our food comes from. And trust me–we should care.

In Entertainment Weekly’s review of the film, Owen Gleiberman gave a striking last thought to sum up the film: “A big-picture vision of conglomerate duplicity and control, Food, Inc. is hard to shake, because days after you’ve seen it, you may find yourself eating something — a cookie, a piece of poultry, cereal out of the box, a perfectly round waxen tomato — and you’ll realize that you have virtually no idea what it actually is.”

Embedding for the Food, Inc. trailer has been disabled by request, but you can watch it here.