June 7, 2009

Food, Inc. - You won't want to eat again

Food Inc. is a new movie. Not about food, but about how America is destroying food. It's as if we are paving the fields of paradise and putting up a parking lot (for McDonald's).

Do you ever wonder how businesses can sell a hamburger for a buck, and soda for less than milk? Have you ever wonder why, businesses would do that?

Twenty years ago, it was clear to everyone who ever looked at the automobile industry that America needed a new model...not a new car model, but a new business model built on efficiencies. Overall transportation efficiencies: like electric trains, hydrogen buses, bike-friendly cities, etc. But most of all we didn't need Hummers getting 10 m.p.g. But nobody at GM was getting bonuses thinking outside of the internal combustion engine.

Well, the same thing is happening in food. Everyone knows we need to grow broccoli a lot more than 400-pound cows to supply Burger King with fatty hamburgers. Everyone knows we need less pesticides and more nutrition in our food. Everyone knows we need less 100,000 chicken cooped up, and more sustainable food sources.

GM is bankrupt. Look out Monsanto. Look out Tyson. Look out meat producers. Look out pork producers. Look out corn syrup producers. Look out Coke.

Check out Food, Inc.'s website.

Here's an excerpt from the New York Times review:

“Food, Inc.” begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000,” Michael Pollan says as the film opens. Mr. Pollan, an author and occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is the spiritual guide for the film and serves as its narrator. “A lot of it is hard to watch,” he conceded, “but I think people are ready to take a good, unflinching look at how their food is produced."