The film Food, Inc. makes it very clear that something is very wrong with our food system today. It is very different from what we think of our food supply, deliberately so. According to the film, the food industry intentionally separates our awareness from what we’re eating by presenting a very different idea of what our food actually is. Even though we see images of fresh country farms and cows grazing in fields in commercials on TV, what we’re really getting is factory raised meat and mass-produced single crop food products that is abusing people, abusing animals, and blocking any measures that might be taken to protect the public in general.
Workers are being abused through factories that produce our food at every stage of the process. The abuse of human rights begins with the factory line mentality of uniformity of production. In training employees to perform one job only, that employee is both low-skilled and easily replaceable so they have no leverage to get the company to treat people right. This occurs in the factories and in the restaurants, but also extends back to the farmers. The farmer’s life has changed to be essentially slaves to the corporation that owns their chickens or their crops. Chicken farmers only own the parts of the farm that cost money to maintain and they’re under contract with Tyson to raise Tyson’s chickens. Tyson owns the chickens themselves. This makes the farmers entirely dependent on the company and gives them no means of insisting on changes for better conditions for themselves or their animals.
The process is inhumane to the animals as they are grown in the smallest possible space to maximize the overall profit. Growing chickens in half the amount of time it would take naturally and to be twice as big means that the chickens’ bones don’t grow fast enough to keep up with their extra growth and so they can’t even stand up on their own. The chickens are forced to live most of their lives in the dark and have never seen the sun. This is in order to keep them settled down so they don’t work off their meat and make them easier to catch. The place where they live becomes so overwhelmed with ammonia and dust that many chickens die before they even get to market.
These same tactics are being used in the crop farms, too. According to the film, even though there are a lot of different labels on the market for our food, there are only about four different companies that own all the meat production in the country and most of the food we get in the grocery market is made of a soy or corn product because those are the biggest crops being raised today. By allowing companies like McDonalds or Tyson to control 80% of the market in a food product, that company gains the ability to control how production of that product takes place. Whether it is forcing farmers to abuse animals on the farms or lobbying to get advantageous to big corporation crop farming legislation passed, industrial agriculture is having a strong effect on everything we know about our food, including what gets on the label.
Because the food producers have managed to dominate the market so much and install a factory system into the whole food production cycle, they are now able to set the laws that govern that production and have made it possible for greater abuse of human and animal rights at all levels of the food chain. While the employees within the food production industry have lost their ability to demand better pay and better working conditions, the animals have become subject to gross experiments in massive rapid growth and maximizing meat production with no concern for the animal’s suffering. However, these abuses come down to each one of us as we all pay for the privilege of being poisoned and abused as consumers and victims of the same processes.
- Food, Inc. Dir. Robert Kenner. Perf: Eric Scholsser, Michael Pollan. Participant Media, 2008. Film.
