Food Inc. is about the business of food. To paraphrase Brad Pitt’s character in Inglourious Basterds, “Cousin, business is a-boomin’.”
The movie places much of the blame of America’s rapidly expanding waistline on the mass-processed, mass-produced industry that has given us the McNugget, the hundred-cow beef patty and now the breadless KFC Double Down sandwich. In other words, the same sort of things Dr. Frankenstein might build had he been in the business of fast food.
We see pigs running wherever they please around a farm. This is contrasted with a bunch of factory-farm pigs being hustled into a Smash-o-matic 3000. Chickens are slaughtered on a friendlier farm by being loaded into a giant funnel before their throats are slit. Then we get the view of what mechanically separated chickens look like. While this isn’t the spaghetti-and-meatballs you normally see in a PETA video, it does make you chew that Whopper all the slower.
The documentary’s point boils down to this: Because most of the food we eat is mass-produced, we don’t know where it comes from or if it’s even good for us to eat. This is bad.
My main problem with the movie is that, if only bought organic, food producers would take notice, change their ways and all our problems would be solved. At root is the problem that the cheapest food is almost never the best for you. The movie shows us a family who, while in the produce section, sees that buying a pound of pears isn’t as cheap or as filling as going to Burger King. Heck, even a salad at McDonalds is more expensive than a Big Mac.
Food Inc. wants you to change. Who Killed The Electric Car, another let’s-make-life-better-minded documentary, lists the culprits at the end of the documentary, which turns out to be just about everybody who didn’t buy the General Motors EV-1 (Formula: Everyone – 2,234). And like An Inconvenient Truth, the end of Food Inc. lists a number of things you can do to better your carbon-loving food-loving lifestyle.
Here’s how long I was guilted off fast food after consuming the following products: Fast Food Nation (book): 3 months, Supersize Me: 2 weeks, Fast Food Nation (movie): an hour.
How did Food Inc. affect my eating habits?
A week before watching it, I was in the mood for smoked sausages. Luckily for me, a family pack of Bar-S Smoked Sausages was on sale for $5. The Homer Simpson maxim “I’d be stupid not to buy it” played through my head. When I got home I discovered I accidentally bought the kind filled with cheese.
These hardly can be classified as sausages in the first place, more of a fat hot dog with little cheese pustules poking through the surface. Last time I checked, the Sausage Qualification Standards ended at anything that could also be cooked in a microwave. No matter, they tasted good enough.
It wasn’t long after the movie when I checked the ingredient list, which included parts from three different species of animal and enough sodium content to last me a week. These “sausages” were no longer welcome in my house.
With a sickening plop in the trash can, my beef-heart-infused Bar-S Smoked Sausage with Cheese Family Pack days were over. The remaining 11 sausages stared back up at me from the can as if to say, “Beef hearts aren’t all bad. It’s kinda like meat. You like meat right?”
I closed the lid.
