Food Inc essay - Grade: A PDF

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Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

Food Inc, which is directed by Robert Kenner and co-produced by Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, is the latest food expose to hit the mass market. The 93-minute documentary is part Our Daily Bread, with a dash of The World According to Monsanto and a liberal mixing of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. The result is a haunting documentary look into the North American food system - one of the most corporate controlled, unhealthiest, cruelest food systems on the planet.

According to the narrators in the movie, the current food industry has something wrong in producing products. First, they raise their animal to supply food for the industry in bad situations. Factory farming also clearly affects the animals. In the factory farm, the animal is considered a unit of production rather than a living creature, and efficiency and earnings often outweigh animal health and welfare. People have differing views on how much comfort and freedom farm animals deserve. Some would say that to keep food inexpensive, animals should be raised in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. Others would argue that animals should not suffer needlessly and that they should have a certain level of cleanliness and space. In the movie, the narrators told us that the meat-packed companies owned the birds from the day they were born to the day they were slaughted. According to Mr.Lobb, member of National Chicken Council, the chicken industry has set a model that they can product all the birds with exactly the same size so that the food corporations can give their customers the products with the same quality for all over the country with the cheapest price. Therefore, what they product is not chicken, it is food. The movie also showed us about the husbandry process of a typical chicken grower. They grow their chickens too fast that they can only take few steps due to their weight and rapid growing up. Moreover, she compared this process with “mass production” in the

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

assembling line in the factory. The producers always care about how fast they can get their chickens grown up with the decide weight not about the quality. Second, the producers abuse the diversity of nutrition of corn, the main ingredient in a diet meal, to feed all their animals. Therefore, it leads to the lack of nutrition. Our bodies need more our bodies need more variety, or our food system being in danger if those crops develop a pest or other problem. The producers hide all contains in their food so that people have no idea about what is really in our food.

Third, the producers are trying to ignore their responsibility for keeping the food safe. According to the movie, the narrators talked about the E.coli; a group of bacteria that live inside the intestines of humans, other mammals, and birds; which caused the death of Kevin and more 5000 people each year. Numerous federal agencies are responsible for food safety and inspection in the United States, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and others. However, no one agency is responsible for all foods, and agencies may split responsibility for even the same food product. With frozen pizzas, for example, the cheese is regulated by the FDA and the pepperoni by the USDA. One drawback with this system is that potential problems can slip through the cracks. Another is that each agency has competing priorities for funding and staffing. At the FDA, for example, most of the budget funds drug regulation—not food inspection—and at the USDA, there is a chronic shortage of meat inspectors. A wave of recent food recalls is an indication of the inadequacy of our food safety system. A recall is when consumers are asked to return potentially unsafe products for refund and usually results from an outbreak of illness. While recalls do control the immediate spread of the illness, they also underscore a systemic lack of prevention strategies. As depicted in the film, the fragmentation of our food safety system can lead to tragic results.

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

Barbara Kowalcyk and Patricia Buck, Kevin’s mother and grandmother, have worked for years to pass the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act, or “Kevin’s Law.” This bipartisan bill was designed to increase the USDA’s authority to set and enforce food safety standards for meat and poultry. For example, if a meatpacking plant were to repeatedly fail contaminant tests, the USDA could shut it down. Some people say that regulations like Kevin’s Law would keep consumers safer. However, others argue that such regulations are impractical and based on contaminant tests that do not give an accurate picture of meat and poultry safety. Still others believe that regulations like this are only a stop-gap measure and that a reorganization of the entire food safety system is necessary for real change. When there is somebody get sick due to your food, even you don’t mind you have to take responsibility for.

Fourth, American people now choose more fast food than healthy food due to its cheap price. The federal government subsidizes many of the ingredients come from crops so that the price of fast food has decreased for 23% from 1983 to 2000, the price of fresh fruits and vegetables has increased for 40%. In the movie, a family had to choose fast food instead of healthy food even though their father was diabetes and they knew clearly what is good for their health due to their low-income. The lowest-cost options at the grocery store are often those made up of refined grains with added sugars and fats. The main reason these products are cheap is that they contain one or more subsidized ingredients. For example, nearly all processed foods contain high-fructose corn syrup. This proliferation of cheap—but unhealthy—food has had the greatest impact on low-income families, who spend a larger percentage of their earnings on food. Because they must live on tight budgets, the price difference between fresh fruits and vegetables and food with subsidized ingredients forces them to consume more processed foods than they

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

otherwise would. An unfortunate result is that income is now the most accurate predictor of obesity and Type 2 diabetes—two conditions linked to diet. Fifth, the food industry downgraded the working environment, lowered wages… by having workers perform the same task again and again to increase efficiency and replace them easily with another one as well. The film portrays that while the unskilled laborers in large slaughterhouses have one of the most dangerous jobs in the U.S., they have low wages, little job security, and no union to represent them. It also describes how meatpacking companies have actively recruited workers in Mexico, where 1.5 million farm jobs have been lost since 1994, partly due to U.S. policies. The final scene of the chapter shows immigration agents arresting meatpacking workers at a trailer park. Sixth, they just tried to run profit and forget the environment. It is unacceptable. They poisoned the food by chemical fertilizers and polluted the environment with pesticides. They want to produce as much as possible with the lowest fee so that they can get the biggest profit. While prices for commodity crops like corn and soybeans have remained constant since about 1970, costs for fuel, seed, fertilizer, and everything else a farmer needs have raised steadily with inflation. That means that it takes large quantities of capital to run a farm, a reality that has wiped out many small farms and transformed most U.S. agriculture to large businesses. As a result, the number of farms in the U.S. dropped from 7 million in 1930 to 2 million in 2000—and of those 2 million farms, just 3 percent produced 75 percent of the nation’s farm output. Therefore, you should choose a quality supplier for your food which you believe in their reputation.

Seventh, the industrial food inc. used genetic modification to speed up the process of improving plant, which otherwise can take many, many years for even small changes. It also allows people to develop plants with new traits that cannot be found in nature, such as the ability

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

to resist specific diseases. But genetic modification also raises many concerns. For one thing, we do not know all the long-term consequences of genetic modification to human health or the environment. For another, there is no way to keep genetically modified crop varieties separate from conventional varieties when they are cross-pollinated by wind and insects; in fact, people have already found genetically modified DNA in conventional corn, soybeans, and canola seeds. Other concerns are that the use of genetic modification may lead to fewer species and less genetic variety within species, and that it may give bioengineering companies too much control over the world’s food production. Finally, they used power to protect their business and get market for their products. With the law, they don’t have to give customers any information about their food. Therefore, they can hide what they did, what we really eat.

In this movie, the narrators want to give us an objective view about the truth of the current food industry. The movie condemned the producer for their running profit despite everything. They unleashed the dark side of the producers about the supply, the responsibility, the labor, pollution…. The movie also give us the knowledge about what is really in our food so that we can have a good choice for what to eat to get a better health and protect our family from the illnesses they can be affected. Besides that, we can fight for the worker right so that they can get a better wage and working environment. Moreover, we know what food Inc did to our environment. Therefore, we have to fight for our planet, make a pressure on the industrial company to change their way of processing. The narrators want to give us all information about their wrong: pollution, genetic moderation… and who protect their right from customer.

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

The Food Inc tries to give their customers the product with cheapest price as possible, what they want most now. Everyone wants to have a meal with the cheapest price with full of nutrition, plentiful, and healthy. However, the popular choice for people in this economic crisis is cheap food. They want to full their stomach first then they can go on with their work. Their wages now are hurt by the crisis in 2008 so their income for food is smaller than ever. They will choose fast food instead of fresh fruits or vegetables due to its price. They except to be affected by bacteria or illness just because their income can afford a better meal with healthy food. That is opportunity of cheap food.

I don’t think that the market should result in an efficient allocation of resources. They only used corn for everything from producing food to feeding animals. Although they have cheap price, they have waste another resources such as another fruit instead of using only corn for their food so that they can have their product have better quality. If there is another food which is healthier and has s suitable price for everyone, the food inc will face a loss of profit due to customer change their mind from buying fast food with full of harm to using fresh fruits and vegetables to have a better health.

In conclusion, there is, in the end, something inherently frustrating about a movie that’s at once as fine, ambitious and, at a crisp 93 minutes, as abbreviated as “Food, Inc.” Time and again the movie stops short before it really gets started, as with the debates over the big business of organic food. The moment when an organic farmer cheerily tells a smiling Wal-Mart representative that her family has been boycotting the company for years is hilarious. But it’s also over before the issues have really been thrashed through. And while I appreciate the impulse

Tra Nguyen (Cindy)

Food Inc essay

ECO 3309

behind the final checklist that tells what viewers can do for themselves and the world (etc, eat organic), given everything we’ve just seen, it also registers as far too depressingly little....