Food Inc.: Health on the Downfall due to Dirty Business Big businesses play a major role in all aspects of government and have managed to get a patent on life, meaning that they can control the way people live. What better way to control the lives of citizens then to create laws controlling the way food is produced and manufactured. In the food documentary, Food Inc, produced by Robert Kenner there is a discussion and display about the way food is made and how it has affected both the citizens and the way that big businesses have corrupted the agricultural and meat industry. The documentary goes through various ways that business have caused farmers to produce crops and meats inhumanely. Food in the United States as begun to be produced so …show more content…
produced by Robert Kenner discusses how food in the country has started to be produced inhumanely, it shows how as consumers we must make sure to keep ourselves informed on the ways food is produced. Also, as consumers, we must fight to not allow businesses work in corrupt ways, and the government should not allow corrupt business practices and fight for our food to be produced organically. Companies like Monsanto or Smithfield have so many ties in the government that allow the to regulate the farmers work in either agriculture or in the meat industry. The worst part about all that these companies are doing is they are only helping themselves when they are really costing the country millions and millions of dollars for costs dealing with health or dealing with bank loans causing massive …show more content…
Throughout the interview the farmer discusses how Tyson will require her to update her farms in order to increase production and require her to pay for it which cause her to go into to more debt. A statistic given by the documentary states that, “ a farmer pays around $500,000 to open 3 chicken farms, and the average chicken farmer makes around $18,000 per year.” This statistic given in the documentary goes to show how the companies like Tyson maximize profit by outsourcing the work where they do have to pay the expenses of operating the farms. Along with the endless debt that is piled up there are countless side effects that come from growing the chickens and operating a chicken farm. Side effects like diseases, becoming immune to antibiotics, and the filth that surrounds the operation of a chicken farm. The debt that farmers accumulate gets to such a large number that there is no way out of the business and must deal with being connected to their company. With all the upgrades that are demanded by big poultry companies like Tyson or Perdue, and, “between 2004 and 2006 chicken farmers spent over $650 million on upgrades to their chicken farms, an average of $38,000 per farm.” This debt that is racked up is taking out by loans that farmers must pay back to the banks with no assistance from the big poultry companies. Though the
Kenner uses the rhetorical strategy ethos by introducing important people of the food industry to the people of America. Kenner introduces us to Joel Salatin. He runs the farm called “Polyface farms”. He compares amd explains in the movie/documentary how his farm is ran and how the animals are fed and treated compared to corporations like Smithfield and Tyson. Kenner features the “Polyface Farm” from anywhere to what the animals eats to where the animals live. Salatin acknowledges that his animals do not eat corn or any product with corn involved. Salatin guides us through the process of killing chickens and how they are handled and packaged. Kenner also compared this process with with huge corporations like Tyson and how their chickens are killed. Tyson has their chicken coops packed with so many that the chickens are unable to move around so when chicken farmers feed the Tyson chickens they all keep gaining weight since they are big that they can con carry their own weight anymore. The chicken farmers emphasize that Tyson tries to make every chicken look alike so that when that chickens are packaged there will not be a huge size discrepancy. Another man interviewed in the movie/documentary is Moe Parr. Parr was a seed cleaner for local farmers around their town. Parr addressed that Monacello (seed company) was sueing him for cleaning seeds. Monasello’s argument was that they have a contract with every farmer who buys seeds from them; that when they save their seeds that they are expected to send those seeds back to the
For example, the film presents the counterproductive result of feeding cows with contained brains of infected cows that spread a deadly disease through the cattle known as ‘the mad cow disease’. This type of intensive farming is characterized by its use of antibiotics and pesticides that cost higher prices for farmers. Some farmers turn into the industrial farming not always by choice but for companies that own or influence those intense farming practices. There is two agribusiness that has a monopoly the market by selling agricultural technologies to farmers such as pesticides, GMO, and fertilizers that often influence the public policy and farming practices. This system is unsustainable and produces cheap food products which cost is not included in the market but people end up paying for due to the externalities on health, social and environmental problems. As the documentary highly at the start, Americans hate the most the inconvenience of things and therefore some people take for granted their food and prefer to consumed processed products that are toxic, other people who live in food deserts do not have much choice to consumed these toxic products but is the system that limits their accessibility to affordable fresh
In the documentary, Food Inc., we get an inside look at the secrets and horrors of the food industry. The director, Robert Kenner, argues that most Americans have no idea where their food comes from or what happens to it before they put it in their bodies. To him, this is a major issue and a great danger to society as a whole. One of the conclusions of this documentary is that we should not blindly trust the food companies, and we should ultimately be more concerned with what we are eating and feeding to our children. Through his investigations, he hopes to lift the veil from the hidden world of food.
• Those who work for a Smithfield hog processing plant say the company has the same mentality towards workers as they do the hogs
This documentary changed the way I now look at food. What disturbed me the most was the inhumane treatment that meat companies do to these animals. When chicks become hatched from their shell, they are immediately placed on a conveyor belt, seconds old into their life. They are then thrown out to be stamped by a worker. This to me is already not right, they should be hatched in a farm not a factory. When these chicks grow up to be chickens, they never see the light of day in their coop houses. They are crowded together in thousands of numbers in these coop houses. Some of the chickens die because they are too fat to move around in coop. Today, chickens are grown to be slaughtered in 48 days, versus
The film Food Inc., like many other films of its category is not so much of an informative documentary, rather more of a slanderous exposé which blows the lid off of the food industry and its operations. To say that the film is neutral and tends towards more of an educative approach would be a misinterpretation to say the least. Throughout the entire movie it is always evident that the movie aims not solely to educate its audience about the truth of their food, but to convert the misinformed and inspire a rebellion against food industry practices. The movie does this through a tactful approach of bombarding its audience with gruesome clips, facts and testimonial story lines. The film asserts it claim through a thrilling critique of the horrific meat production process which is most prevalent in the U.S food industry and its impact on humans and the environment, while extoling alternative practices which seem to be more sustainable and humane, yet are underutilized. The film goes on to highlight the different players in the food politics arena, emphasizing the role that government agencies play. Also the film divulges the reality that is the monopolization of the food industry by big multinational corporations such as Monsanto Company, Tyson Food, Perdue Farms, Smithfield Foods, etc.
The Chicken industry has set a model for all meat industry’sth because they want All the birds coming off the farms to be the same size, creating affordable prices, and big profit. But at what cost? The first cost is to the farmers. These farmers, like the chickens, mean nothing to companies like Tyson, because the farmers have no rights and therefore can not complain and the Companies keep farmers under control by creating debt.
I am so ashamed that I had not known most of the information that was shared in Food, Inc. I definitely agree that we need to have a policy change regarding our food, it should be cheaper to buy carrots than chips at the grocery store. I, like many college students, want to eat healthy but it is expensive and most of us are on a “ramen budget”. There also needs to be tighter laws regarding the illnesses that can come from improper handling of the meat and crops. I believe that there needs to be a huge change in the agricultural world, the farmers should not have to be scared of losing money or being sued because of big companies, such as Monsanto. The huge companies are going to be making money no matter what without much work. Whereas a farmer puts in work day in and day out and sadly they do not make much money. I also believe that the film had an extremely negative outlook on how modern farming practices in agriculture are. I believe that Food, Inc. focused on the negative outlook of modern farming but did not mention about the different practices or how they have also positively impacted our
Everyone has the right to know what's in the food that they are eating. It's upsetting how these massive corporations dominate American citizens. If everyone knew how much brutality was required to meet the demands of the fast food industry, I like to think the public would simply not tolerate it and demand that animals stop being designated property in law. I find it impossible to believe that if people knew the reality that they would not want animals to have recourse to legal protections from enduring lifetimes of nothing but abuse.
Body mass index, or BMI, is used by doctors and health physicians to measure excessively high levels of body fat in relation to lean body mass in an individual. Having a BMI ratio that is considered above average or too high normally denotes persons at risk to several health adversities such as heart attacks, liver damage, diabetes, and even more widespread, obesity. In 2005, the United States Department of Health and Human Services estimated that over half of the adult American population was either overweight or obese, and many of these health concerns were correlated with a person’s diet and type of food consumption. In an attempt to assign blame for the cause, political and social commentators’ claim that long standing farm subsidies on particular food commodities correlate with rising obesity trends in America. In a documentary titled Food, Inc., opened to audience in 2008, award winning filmmaker Robert Kenner argues that current agricultural policies on these subsidized food commodities are allowing major food corporations to mass produce products that negatively affect the health of consumers nationwide. He contends that commodity crops such as corn, wheat, and soybeans are heavily subsidized by the government to produce snack foods that are high in calorie content but low in cost, becoming the prime choice for Americans looking for cheap and readily available foods to eat. Kenner believes that government subsidies need to either be
In the movie “Food Inc” we saw how the food industry keeps their farmers under their control. Food incorporation sets new protocols that require the farmers to keep purchasing more on dept. As a result of loans and only $18,000 annually (Kenner) they are stuck in a hole that they can’t get out of. I find many things disturbing about this. First off, I find it disturbing that he picked a poorly educated farming area. It seems obvious that the farmers don’t know what they got into and don’t have any knownldge of how to get out. I find it an example of poor unionization within the small farmers that are to be blamed not the ones that find out how to exploit it (Kenner).
The phrase “ you are what you eat” has been used for centuries. The healthier your food the healthier you can be. However, as time goes on, I hope this phrase is no longer true. The documentary Food Inc. shows our food and what farm fresh really means; things are not always what they seem. The documentary is dark and gruesome in the way it displays our food and what goes into making it, but it also opens our eyes to the world of production and similarly what we see and what we should be seeing. Although it is a gut wrenching documentary, there is an educational informative truth behind it to see if food is really food anymore.
Regulating what the government should control and what they should not was one of the main arguments our founding fathers had to deal with when creating our nation, and to this day this regulation is one of the biggest issues in society. Yet, I doubt our founding fathers thought about the idea that the food industry could one day somewhat control our government, which is what we are now facing. Marion Nestles’ arguments in the book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health deal with how large food companies and government intertwine with one another. She uses many logical appeals and credible sources to make the audience understand the problem with this intermingling. In The Politics of Food author Geoffrey
Watching the documentary Food Inc, there were a few points that stood out most to me. I think one of the most important concerns that were brought up is the consumers not knowing the truth behind the food. Whether there is actual harm in our food or not, we still need to know what is going into our food. The harm that may actually be inside our food can be caused by how easy it is to produce crap food now days. Making mass produced food is a lot easier than it has been in the past because genetics have changed animals into growing faster and fatter. This causes harm to the environment by creating factories for these foods to be made, which causes pollution by emitting many CO2 gasses. However this isn’t a concern for the producer. The producer is mainly focused on money they receive even if it causes harm to the environment or the consumers. The use of pesticides and other substances are used in foods, whether it’s in the production of corn growing or in the food in general to help keep germs out. This also causes harm to the consumer and environment that we should be aware of.
The food industry does not want you to know anything more than what you think about what goes on within our farms, because if you knew, you wouldn’t want anything to do with it and they would lose millions of dollars. The reality of it is, these are not farms we are getting our food from, it is a factory. Your image of the cows, pigs, and chickens running around freely is not what “farms” are like today at all. Our meat is being produced by huge corporations that have all the power in the food industry to do whatever they please to. The fruits and vegetables are being picked while still green all over the world wherever the food is in season after being sprayed with harmful chemicals so it stays fresh till it hits our kitchen tables. Our food is coming from factories, mass farming, and assembly lines, where the food has become a danger to us and the people producing it. This issue has a personal meaning for me because, I