Food, Inc.
Having spent a lot of my reading time recently with the works of Michael Pollan- The Omnivore’s Dilemma,I was eager to see the new film Food, Inc.
“food”
If you want to see a microcosm of all that is wrong with this country, this is it.
If you can’t imagine a company defending the right to sell rancid beef, chock full of e coli that kills children, then you haven’t really examined what WSB called the “naked lunch”. The majority of the food for sale in American supermarkets shares two common characteristics: It all contains corn, and its all produced by four mega-huge growers. Monstanto owns 99% of the soybean seed in this country, and actively pursues and forces into bankruptcy anyone who attempts to save its seeds to replant. The industrial food industry in this country has only one objective in mind- as much profit per acre as can be extracted. Who cares if the food causes diabetes and obesity? Who cares if the hamburger you ate today is ground from thousands of different cows, some possibly contaminated with Mad Cow, who stood ankle deep in their own feces for weeks?
America’s woes- both internal and external- all have a common cause.
Greed.
It’s greed that keeps the Goldman Sachs ghouls feasting on your wallet, producing nothing of worth except for swollen bonuses and credit derivatives, creating the widest gap in income levels this country has suffered since the last great depression. It’s greed that keeps us in the Middle East, beholden to oil companies, weapons contractors and Israel, slaughtering innocents in the name of American Exceptionalism. And its greed that wiped out the family farm and the health of this nation, all in pursuit of more dollars per acre. The government…uh…we…subsidize the growing of corn, sugar, soybeans, anything you can name, and since its so cheap, its what McDonalds uses to make its shit food that makes you fat and forces you into the emergency room with Type 2 diabetes. Its not for nothing that obesity is a poor man’s disease, because the only food you can afford on minimum wage is 2 for $1.00 tacos, liters of corn syrup laden Mountain Dew, and chips. And since you have to work from dawn to dusk, take care of the kids, wash the clothes, and cut the grass, you don’t have time to prepare actual food, but rather you heat a combination of fats and sugars, pour fake gravy over instant mashed potatoes, and yippie, its dinner.
Now, if you’re rich you can eat local, shopping at the corner market for fresh vegetables grown only a few miles away in season. Then you take your festive hemp bag full of goodies home where you can spend an hour or so combining ingredients to create a meal. A meal that actually provides the nutrients your body needs in a format that it can digest (instead of “enriched” products where vitamins are sprayed on the food or given as growth hormones to sick chickens)- and won’t make you ill, or give you a life-threatening disease. But the majority of the nation can’t do that. So they eat the “cheap” food- except once you add in the subsidies to the big agricultural factories, the health care costs, and the diminished life spans, that crap ain’t “cheap” at all. It’s just crap we never, ever finish paying for.
Greed. Feces-caked, disease carrying, monoculture greed. Its whats for dinner.
