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TechnoratiFilm Aims to Expose Dangers in US Food Industry
NEW YORK - Bigger-breasted chickens fattened artificially. New strains of deadly E. coli bacteria. A food supply controlled by a handful of corporations.
The documentary "Food, Inc." opens in the United States on Friday and portrays these purported dangers and changes in the U.S. food industry, asserting harmful effects on public health, the environment, and worker and animal rights.
Big corporations such as biotech food producer Monsanto Co., U.S. meat companies Tyson Food Inc. and Smithfield Foods, and poultry producer Perdue Farms all declined to be interviewed for the film.
But the industry has not stood silent. Trade associations across the $142-billion-a-year U.S. meat industry have banded together to counter the claims. Led by the American Meat Institute, they have created a number of websites, including one called SafeFoodInc.com.
"Each sector of the industry that's named is doing its part to counter a lot of the misinformation in the movie," said Lisa Katic, a dietitian and consultant with an unnamed coalition of trade associations representing the food industry.
Their campaign promotes the U.S. food supply as safe, abundant and affordable, whereas the film asserts that images of animals grazing on grassy farms emblazoned on U.S. food product labels are misleading.
"Food, Inc." explores the argument that food comes not from friendly farms but from industrial factories that put profit ahead of human health.
"The film pulls back the curtain on the way food is produced," said Michael Pollan, who appears in the film and is the best-selling author of several books including "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto.
"Products with farm labels attached -- this stuff comes from factories now," he said.
But an industry spokesman said 98 percent of U.S. farms were family owned and operated and they accounted for 82 percent of farm production.
Mace Thornton of the American Farm Bureau, the nation's largest farm group, said the industry was interested in the well-being of farm animals.
"If a farmer or rancher is not the kind of person to take care of their animals, they're not going to be in business long," he said.
A PEEK INSIDE
The film shows footage inside cattle, pork and chicken production plants, some secretly recorded by immigrant workers under cramped conditions for both workers and the animals.
Maryland farmer Carole Morison let cameras in to show chickens collapsing and dying before they are put on the market because, she said, of fast weight gain caused in part by antibiotics in the feed. Morison said she lost her contract with Perdue.
The film says U.S. food corporations now widely use industrial techniques linked to growing problems like obesity, diabetes, salmonella, toxic strains of common E. coli bacteria and environmental pollution.
"Confined animal agriculture is so unsustainable in so many ways. It depends on using antibiotics in the feed that lead to antibiotic-resistant diseases. It produces more pollution than any other industry," Pollan said.
"It costs treasury, costs the public health system," he said. "The film vividly shows it costs the people who do the work and of course it is brutal to the animal."
Barbara Kowalcyk, whose 2-year-old son Kevin died from an infection of E. coli, appears in the film trying to persuade Congress to pass "Kevin's law," which would give the U.S. Department of Agriculture the power to shut down plants that produce contaminated meats. It has not passed.
Consumers can effect change, the film says, pointing to Stonyfield Farm's Gary Hirshberg, who now offers his line of organic products at giant chain Wal-Mart due to demand.
"You vote for what you eat by what you buy at the supermarket," Pollan said.
(Additional reporting by Daniel Trotta; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Philip Barbara)
48 Comments so far
Show AllYou want to change the way people eat, change your way of eating. I buy organic, or free range meats, wild caught fish, too. I pay allot more, but then again, I have been eating less, enjoying it more. I have lost some weight because my food has favor and nutrition which is lacking in the factory foods.
America is a factory owned and operated by the corporate pigs (as in Animal Farm).
What they do to animals in industrial farms is unhealthy and unnatural. We all pay the price whether we eat at this table or not.
What they do to animals is: Torture.
Exactly, And it is not without consequences. The list of consequences is staggering. Knowledge is the first step and once you try to change how you eat and survive outside of this system you really begin to notice just how much this affects the world around you. Living in a one way taking system that doesn't give back makes the air we breath hurt. So many people take something like prozac thinking they are sick when really they live in a sick society and there isn't a pill that will fix it.
I'm no believer in abstractions, but anybody who thinks they can eat pain, torture, a lifetime of mistreatment, and have a healthy diet is a fool.
It's the poor, not the foolish that will inherit the earth.
Many organizations, businesses/universities are buying offsets from livestock operations (because the methane is being captured and burned for fuel) to offset their own greenhouse gas emissions. THough, I don't think the perfect should be the enemy of the good, aren't we just feeding the hand that bites us by doing that?
Food production should not be subject to economies of scale, period. That is akin to getting the most amount of life for the least cost, which on a small scale might work, but on the industrial scale amounts to the present sad, disgusting and unethical industrial practice of raising animals for meat consumption.
Coco's question to zmann is crucial: who's going to convince or require industrial farms to switch to organic/permaculture production?
zmann's hope for this switch is sensible and laudable enough, but he can't answer Coco's question because there IS no credible answer.
Given America's entrenched, sociopathic economic and political system, healthy mass-production of food no less than a humanely-reformed foreign policy, can not happen.
Nor is there any credible answer RE how to popularly UN-entrench such a system anytime soon.
Meanwhile, profit-at-any-price, unregulated corporate mass-production food system is poisoning even those us who don't eat such food directly. And the lead article above focuses only on this one part of the tip of a much larger iceberg.
In the US alone, millions of tons of industrial crop fertilizers are legally and routinely intermixed with low-level radioactive and chemical contaminants -- to grow our 'food' (cf: NRDC, WorldWatch Institute, et al, scientific reports.)
Year after year this is now happening, and the 'free market' practice of creating and disposing of such contaminants is spreading mindlessly across much of the rest of the planet as well.
This, to say nothing of the billions of hard-manufactured consumer products which are also becoming the composite end-dump for same and similar 'low-level' industrial refuse bio-toxics, nor the toxic pharmaceuticals which industrial capitalism markets to millions to solve the body/mind wrecking disorders caused initially by the Other unregulated toxins released into in the environment.
Our children and their children, assuming any of them in sequence manage to survive into bio-mentally competent adulthood from all the additional, anti-life factors we present propagators of so-called modern civilization are now glibly conjuring for them, will rightly never forgive us our rottenly mean solipsisms.
Anyway, RE food in the present:
Best to grow your own, and if you don't have time to: Adjust your personal time and definition of 'needs;' try to transcend your Life-ruining consumerist values, to allow at least an Attempt.
BEST TO GROW YOUR OWN FOOD.. is the mother of all truths.
You should begin becoming comfortable with the idea of growing your own food (while its still legal) and this can be accomplished with vertical hydroponics and atmospheric water generation. Both technologies are proven and readily available.
The costs to combine both, save seed and energy costs, are about $10,000.
If you are part of a cooperative spirit that exists between 4 or 5 families and desire free guidance, email lance at verticrop (at) gmail (dot) com.
'The Jungle'.......Written by Upton Siclair in 1906
In this book ,written in 1906, Sinclair wrote about the meat slaughtering business at the turn of the century in Chicago. A must read.
The greed and corruption and 'slavery' and inhumane treatment of its workers has not changed in 100 yrs. The food was just as dangerous to eat then as now.
Which begs the question. Where is our government to police such dangerous practices?
Well, same place it was 100 years ago . Certainly not on the side of the consumer.
Money talks and politicians happily accept.
PS there is a certain politician who hails from Chicago. Not that that means anything. But he is for "CHANGE"
Whoops , the more things change; the more things stay the same.
these documentaries are all well and good but the fact remains there isn't enough of the 'good organic/non factory farmed' stuff for us all..............
Sure there is, if the factory farms convert to organic/permaculture farms. We produce far more 'food' than we need...that's why corn is in everything from plastic to toothpaste.
and who's going to convince them to do that???????................
That's not something I have an answer for.
It costs money to convert to organic methods and organic food will be higher priced. There was another article recently about farmers who had moved over to organic methods but returned to producing lower priced food after this economic crash. Lots of people could not afford the extra pennies to buy the organic food.
Europeans, who care a lot about good food, have subsidized agriculture for a long time. If the government is going to subsidize anything for the public health and welfare, I put food right up there with water systems, education and medical care. I put it way before stadiums, bank bailouts and military.
Food subsidies have been geared toward protecting big agro and not toward promoting public health. That is the wrong use of food subsidies. We should be willing to lay out some tax money for food that does not cause 8 year old girls to develop breasts, for instance.
Joe
Or 26 year old men to develop moobs :-(
You want to see some REALLY Scary movies about this stuff, Google;
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO
&
The FUTURE Of FOODS
my advice, eat Organic, Eat Vegan, Eat Raw and Be Healthy!
Fifteen pounds of grain are required to produce one pound of beef.
Time to dump the big macs.
How much corn does it take to make a gallon of ethanol?
Industrial agriculture is just as harmful to the enviroment when it used to raise masses of corn or vegetables or grain crops.
We should be emulating nature as closely as possible when growing our food and nature does not comprise of fields of vegetables.
All those vegetables and grain crops are destroying the soil which then requires artificial fertilizers be added. A soil that is used over and over again to grow corn, carrots, lettuce spinach (Plug in VEGETABLE here) has little in the way of nutrient value which in turn makes that food less nutritous.
The reason why the great plains were one of the most fertile soils in the world was due in part to the millions of Bison that grazed on the same each year.
This does not suggest I support current practices of Industrial factory farms for our meat products . I alkso feel we have too much meat in ourr diets. I just feel that BALANCE is important and all those Vegans calling for a world where we just eat plants have to realize that this path TOO leads to enviromental destruction.
I'm sorry but I just can't let the simplemindedness of your post stand unchallenged.
Farmers have known about the need for crop rotation for centuries. Food crops can be alternated with restorative crops (such as hemp!), keeping the soil fertile and productive.
There's a big difference in growing our food on smaller, family operated farms and depending on the massive operation of agri-giants such as ADM.
You're trying to have us believe that one season of growing collard greens will turn perfectly arable land into desert.
The proper use of crop byproducts as compost can eliminate the need for either artificial or animal-waste fertilizers. Of course, there's not much profit for the megacorporations in that scenario.
q
>>I'm sorry but I just can't let the simplemindedness of your post stand unchallenged.
Then you should not have challenged my statement with simple minded nonsense. I stand by everything I say .
I ask where, as example, I claimed that one year of growing greems will turn arable land into desert.? If you are going to use hyperbole in order distort my point then you are being dishonest.
Healthy soil needs far more then just Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Pottasium. Healthy soil is full of microbes, bacterias and trace minerals . The natural cycle as nature devolped over millions of years with HERD ANIMALS replenishing soil has been proven to work.
I suggest as example you study the life cycle of the Salmon as a starter and how these Salmon running upriver helps to make healthy forests. This includes the nutrient value of all the salmon dragged into the woods by predators such as bear and eagles and how that ensures rich soil.
How can hemp draw on the oceans nutrients and bring it 500 miles upstream via a river?
If the salmon runs go extinct I suppose we can plant hemp up along the riverbanks.
Nor do I support "megacorporations" . Nor do I believe that raising farm livestock must somehow follow the same processes as the megacorprations. The MegaCorporations grow corn as well. It hardly follows that growing corn is "bad" and we should all become meat eaters.
I ask that you give me examples of ecosystems existant on earth that are successful in producing high volumes of calories that are based on Plant life alone. If it were not for animals eating plants in one area and shitting them out in another plant life would not have evolved beyond the lichen.
My point is "Going Vegeterian" is hardly the salvation some people claim it to be. I believe the best example of that is Nature itself and those that think they can improve on nature via hemp is mans EGO Once again suggesting it can do things better.
"How can hemp draw on the oceans nutrients and bring it 500 miles upstream via a river?"
So how does land far away from salmon runs become fertile?
As for your claim that manure is necessry for growing food, plug this link into your browser and page down the the section with the heading "Manure": http://www.journeytoforever.org/farm_library/QR/QR3.html . The author explains why vegetable compost is just as effective as manure for nourishing plants.
As the article points out, manure is just plant material that has been composted by the animals' digestive processes.
And BTW, the site is not against the use of manure. The author simply points out that it is not necessary and that growing food crops can be successful without access to manure.
I used hyperbole to address the hysterical tone of your post. If you don't like my doing so then use more reasonable arguments.
Also, I don't recall ever suggesting that we get rid of animals.
q
I rely on nature as the example and MY OWN EYES and not someone agenda based upon animals as a source of food and the morality thereof.
I grew up on a small mixed farm and assure you that the land there, the ecology of that farm is in far better shape then the lands of South California where your vegetables are grown.
We grew vegetables as well and they were far healthier and better sources of nutrition then your carrots grown in California. We raised pigs, cattle, hay, chickens and grain. We did not have to IRRIGATE the land relying on rainfall and natures natural cycles. Herbicide use, pesticide use minimal. (Indeed most years we did not bother )
As soon as you start replanting lands to grow just corn, or lettuce or spinach, the risk from certain insects goes UP. Start planting HEMP by hundreds of acres and more in areas it has never grown before and you attract different pests and weeds.
Point of example . We grew our own onions. Delicous things. We would plant about ten rows of them both for the green tops and the bulbs. One year they get hit by an insect that feasts on Onions. We did not use pesticides to rid ourselfs of the pest. We just lost our onions for that year. Our neighbors onions did fine. The winter killed off the pests and our onions fine the next year.
Now imagine growing 5000 ROWS of onions. The odds of said pest striking and running the crop grows exponentialy. The population of said pests would explode. The "fix" is massive use of pesticides.
I have been to Southern California and past its "Vegetable farms" They would not even exist were not millions of gallons of water used to irrigate them. That in itself is destructive to an enviroment.
>>So how does land far away from salmon runs become fertile?
Same method. Just apply it to animals.
The Inuit were able to live off the land for 20 thousand years. There were no vegetables grown there. Now you tell me what landscape is more pristine.? The High Artic, or South California? Potatoes will not grow on Baffin Island. Man can not eat lichen. Man can not eat plankton. Man can eat animals that eat plankton and Lichen. Thats NATURE at work.
We have to learn to live with our enviroment and with its strengths and weaknesses rather then try to remake it because of some belief system that somehow this creature called MAN suddenly knows what is best.
>>Also, I don't recall ever suggesting that we get rid of animals.
Then you made no arguement, rebutting my points for reasons based upon your ignorance of what my points were while labeling mine as "simple minded".
>>As for your claim that manure is necessry for growing food, plug this link into your browser
Where did I make such a claim? I recognize food is grown In california without the use of manure.
I stated CLEARLY, several times over that nature has this figured out and that if we decide to plant HEMP rather then try and emulate nature as closely as possible we create other issues. The benefits of growing hemp are overstated. Grow hemp by the tens of thousands of acres and we affect insects, other plant life, Birds, bees and so on.
>>I used hyperbole to address the hysterical tone of your post. If you don't like my doing so then use more reasonable arguments.
Oh please. I inflected no TONE in my post. Any "hysterical tone" read was put there by yourself. Again you are trying to tell me what I was saying rather then read what I was saying.
GwNorth, High- Two things if I may,
I live among thousands of acres of hemp, more, growing in synchronicity w/ the environment, hurting nature not at all. Flourishing where there were thorned blackberry bushes, poison oak, rocks et al. For the better.
Now as far as you can't grow vegetables in Alberta in December?
There are about 300 covered acres of greenhouses in Alberta, Red-Hat is a consortium of 60 indoor veg growers, one needs a generator, but you can grow cucumbers in December, and have tomatoes in the ground by early January. It is the way.
I grow my own pot indoors, but would not sell a joint at gun-point. However I have friends who got expert at pot, said screw it, & but grow copious vegetables in a greenhouse year round instead-and it freezes & snows sometimes, but it sure works.
ALL organic, I'm to begin selling them at a roadside stand, year-round-a panoply of vege's, but EVERY kind of tomatoe God ever dreamed of,...and quite certainly with free political pamphlets to make one catch fire. ps, always read and enjoy your posts, respectfully, joe.
>>There are about 300 covered acres of greenhouses in Alberta, Red-Hat is a consortium of 60 indoor veg growers, one needs a generator, but you can grow cucumbers in December, and have tomatoes in the ground by early January. It is the way
We already have enough land taken up with BUILDINGS. Nor can every farmer afford to put in Greenhouses. Again your solution is to remake the enviroment.
I spoke of visiting the farm and how peaceful it is. I do not want to go to that countryside and see hundreds of acres of greenhouses everyhwere. Where will they be built?
On top of more land?
Now Imagine visiting the Arctic and seeing 200 greenhouses where there was once tundra and herds of cariboo.
Those three hundred acres of Greenhouses provide a bare mimimum of Vegetables. How many acres would have to be covered over with Greenhouses, along with the needed power requirements to feed 4 million?
When we grow our vegetables outdoors in the summer, we do not need power Generators.
Again I understand there too much meat in our diets and that there the need to cut back. However if people think that going Vegan is more friendly to the enviroment they are wrong. Its just as harmful to plow under 1000 acres of the Amazon to grow corn for ethanol as it is to plow under 1000 acres of the Amazon to raise cattle for Macdonalds.
GwNorth-you stated vegetables could not be grown in Alberta in December. Period.
I pointed out people can & do grow tomatoes, cukes & feed people in Alberta in winter, and you come back with ethanol in the Amazon? O-kay....
You badmouth hemp. I point out you were wrong there too, at least no reply on THAT fallaciousness.
You're not keeping your dots connected,
If you are not mixing apples & oranges,
You are mixing tomatoes w/ corn & Alberta w/ the Amazon, fancy footwork!
But I defer to your superior knowledge base, reservoir of experience and razorlike analytical skills. How presumptuous of me to cognate! peace, I JUST tried to share how we grow vegetables in our winters....regressive anti-earth thinking I realize now, greenhouses going on top of land. Christ. Against God. I feel terrible. Off to confession now. And the hemp-fields. Bring my three chain-saws, gasoline for burn-piles and diesel fuel for the bull-dozer. It works great for pine, oak, rerouting streams and animal dens too. Course pot-eating deer try to run.......escape their fate.
I am keeping all my dots connected. That you can not see it all related is not my doing. The Amazon example is just used to illustrate how "Going Vegan" is just as harmful to an enviroment which is the thrust of my entire arguement.
As to your example of greenhouses.
The greenhouse growing season in Canada is from March TO December. When December hits the amount of sunlight is too little and the subsequent increase in ENERGY needed to grow the same makes it Cost Prohibitive. Yeah I can grow a Tomato in my house but that hardly means it a solution to feeding a population.
How will you come by that extra power for your Greenhouses in Alberta to provide Tomatoes from December through to March?
Alberta relies on Coal for a great percentage of Energy needs. More Coal mines?
Furthermore, I would like to point out that the Tomatoe is NOT a Vegetable. :)
As to hemp. It grown in Southern BC and In Ontario. It is hardly the boon people claim it is. It certainly has its place and the growing of it can be increased but hemp has problems of its own such as a large need for water. (It certainly does not need as much as cotton . It makes sense to replace Cotton in the South US with Hemp)
Average rainfall in Alberta is about 43 CM....Hemp requires between 50 and 70cm a year meaning you will likely gave to irrigate in many areas. North Alberta gets more rain then the South, but the growing year is shorter in North Alberta and hemp needs 5 months frost free in order to produce seeds. There likley enough rain in the North but you cut it close for frost free months.
http://www1.agric.gov.ab.ca/$department/deptdocs.nsf/all/agdex126
This link details problems with Hemp in Alberta.It certainly can be done but the farmer takes quite the gamble.
Barley requires half as much water as hemp thus can grow across much of Alberta without the need to irrigate. Canola require marginaly more then barley and then wheat a bit more then Canola Wheat. All of these need less water then hemp. Farmers in Alberta have this figured out. This is why these remain the big three crops.
Adapt to the Enviroment you are IN rather then trying to adapt the enviroment to what you wish to grow. Doing the latter is less efficient and consumes more energy.
Africa is finally learning this by growing crops that were native to Africa rather then trying to import crops from other regions , then have to rely on Irrigation for them to grow.
Finally I would like to make this point. Many of the animals raised for food on farms trace genetics to species and breeds long since extinct. Their Genes survive ONLY because they have been domesticated.
If you live in Alberta you will know there two major herds of North American Bison. One in Elk Island park and one in Wood Buffalo national Park. Both herds survival is tenous as their gene pool not very diverse and because infections by diseases such as TB require a Cull of the herds less the TB spreads and wipes them all out.
Recently farmers have started raising Bison for their meat. There farms near Grand Prairie and some near edmonton.
This in and of itself will help to ensure that the Bison survive as a species. They are also "natural" to the enviroment being raised in. It a very SUSTAINABLE farming practice meaning the enviroment is preserved in regions which they are raised. They do very well in that enviroment because they are native to it, thus there no need to try and CHANGE the enviroment.
GwNorth, Wow! Way cool, thanks for taking time to share the info. I am only beginning to learn about, have an interest in, and foresee the possibility of growing what I and others eat. Better us than big ag.
G, I was at a Rainbow Gathering giving food away and a little hippie girl asked me if I was a vegetarian and I laughed, told her if she dropped dead at my feet I'd eat her, which I quickly explained to the waif meant I was a carnivore, though I avoid anything that can whip me at chess or play the violin. she took tea and fled.
Meat is cool, in moderation, just not raised or slaughtered inhumanely.
Alberta must be beautiful now. quietly, joe.
Why do you keep referring to California? I live in Georgia and eat locally grown produce bought at a food co-op.
I just used hemp as one example of a restorative crop. There are others such as cowpeas, mangos, and certain grasses..
As far as the Inuit are concerned, do you know what their average lifespan is? It's 12 to 15 years shorter than that of the average Canadian (http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN23624265).
q
Do you know what the average lifespan of someone from Japan? Start eating lots of fish then?
Oh wait. That would mean overfishing. Not to mention the ethical considerations of eating meat.
And the life expectancy of people in India is less then Canadas Inuit...
All I am saying is that SANITY and balance is needed, and that just as factory farms are something we do not need and a form of "extremism" so too is the concept of everyone becoming a vegetarian.
For goodness sakes, large companies harvest fish by the tons that have never been harvested before and that are the basic food source of other species of fish JUST TO MAKE fertilizer to put onto crops to grow plants.
>>As far as the Inuit are concerned, do you know what their average lifespan is? It's 12 to 15 years shorter than that of the average Canadian
I am talking about protecting the enviroment so that our Children and our childrens children can live with it.
If we live to 120 years old and eat everything around us and degrade all our ecosystems what point is there to a longer lifespan? Citizens of the United States of America have a longer life span then the Indingent peoples of the Amazon. Does that mean the amazon should be converted to growing Vegetables?
Living forever is NOT good from Natures point of view. When I die i want my body to rot in some woods and become part of the next tree. I dont want to live to 120 years old. I do not want it at the cost of plowing up pasture land to grow mangoe peas.
As to where YOU grew up you once again miss the point.
What is good for GEORGIA is not good for California. What is Good for California is not good for North Alberta. I really do not see a whole lot of "Vegetables" from Georgia on the Store shelves. Most come from California and Mexico which are both a thousand miles away and more from where I live. How is it ecological to have these Vegetables packaged up and shipped off to all corners of the earth?
The growing season in St paul Alberta , where I grew up , runs from about late May to September. VEGETABLES do not grow there in December. Cattle do feeding off hay we take off the land in the summer.
We all need to EAT. Thats what life is about. Some animals can eat GRASS and convert it into energy. Man can not. Wolves can not. Grass grows naturally across wide swathes of the world. How can anyone in their right minds claim it better for the enviroment we plow all that grass under to grow mango peas and hemp rather then work with nature?
Plus several kegs of beer and gallons of massage oil if you raise the beef Kobe style.
Best solution of all: stop eating meat.
I guess that, from a personal health standpoint, I could qualify that advice by urging folks to stop eating meat that they do not raise themselves. However, think of all of the legumes, grains, and vegetables that could be produced with the same resources used for livestock.
q
This could have beneficial secondary effects to other markets as well, such as the makers of Beano :)
Seriously though, am looking forward to this movie.
Thanks for the qualifier! (about meat)
your friend,
nedlud
p.s. My small herd of cows go out and harvest on pasture land unsuitable or poorly suitable for tilling. Humams can eat alfalfa sprouts(I agree they're good in salads), but I doubt whether the whole entire plant eaten by humans would work. And when the cows use their own legs by pasturing in this manner, they don't really burn any fossil fuel either. Unlike when you cut and bale and chop and haul the hay with a bunch of tractors and other machines. While the cows sit around in an air-conditioned barns (more electricity, more fossil fuel) and have the feed almost 'piped' directly to their lazy mouths, like the poor short-lived cows at the big factories. Thanks again, q.
Raw milk is best!
""You vote for what you eat by what you buy at the supermarket," Pollan said."
Amen--Learn to read labels (a magnifying glass is helpful) and learn the difference between real food and pleasently flavored crap. Buy and eat real food and soon enough the other will either change or go away.
Poet
Another good technique is to focus on the foods at the edges of the supermarket - the produce, meats, milk & eggs, and of course, beer. Most of the garbage food is in the middle.
Better yet, focus on farmers' markets, CSA's, and your own garden and supplant with the above.
The thing is that the real food does tastes better than the industrial crap.
Take milk. Raw milk tastes MUCH better than some industrial homogenised pasteurised milk.
Cheese from raw milk nearly always tastes much better than cheese made from pasteurised milk. Let's not even talk about utter crap like "cheese food".
Rfloh "real food does tastes better than the industrial crap."
Yes you're right!
Not only does it taste better, organic food is much fresher. Try an experiment:
Put a supermarket carrot and an organic one in a glass of water instead of your refrigerator and see how the organic carrot lasts longer.
The supermarket food is often already dead on the store shelf and just like a Hollywood star depends on lighting & chemicals to look good.
Or the big guys will make certain they're the only ones left.
anyone sincerely interested in this stuff, you gotta get down to your local library and read 'bitter fruit' by kinzer and schlessinger... 'stuffed & starved' by patel... 'sick planet' by cox... 'fast food nation' by schlosser'... or even just 'omnivore's dilemma' by pollan and parse out the information from the misinformation PLEASE. and check out a couple other great films related to the topic, 'the future of food' and 'blue gold'.
bon apetit.
The documentary King Corn is good too, if you want to learn how corn has been put into absolutely everything we eat and drink. Also, for water issues, FLOW is great, I just watched it last night.
Thanks for the list.
q
Go to YouTube and search for the authors and/or their books.
There are many videos on the subject of food on YouTube.
Raj Patel and Vanda Shiva are extraordinarily knowledgeable and passionate advocates who speak compellingly on the subject. I urge you to YouTube all their videos.
"Each sector of the industry that's named is doing its part to counter a lot of the misinformation in the movie," said Lisa Katic, a dietitian and consultant with an unnamed coalition of trade associations representing the food industry.
-----------------------------
Misinformation?
They HATE it when someone takes their job!
A quick Google search shows Lisa the Liar works for the Grocery Manufacturers Assoc.
Her phone number is: 202-337-9400
Her email: Email: lkatic@gmabrands.com
Just as the major cause of the financial meltdown is lack of regulation or token regulation at best, food industry problems can be reduced dramatically if regulation was adequate.
Ever since I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, I have been wary of tainted food.