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9 Tidbits from the Maker of “Food, Inc.” (PBS)

June 10th, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments
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David Brancaccio of PBS’s Now show interviewed filmmaker Robert Kenner, the director of “Food, Inc.” a few days ago. The movie takes a very critical look at the modern food industry and helps viewers better understand why supermarket fare for the most part is crap, and why 67% of Americans are obese or overweight. The full interview is 24 minutes long. Here are some good tidbits:

1. 90% of supermarket food has corn or soy products in it. (That’s because soy and corn are subsidized by the government, making them cheap to produce).

2. Fast food chains were the original drivers of the industrialization of food. McDonald’s is and has been for years the largest buyer of ground beef, pork, chicken, potatoes, and tomatoes in the US. And it will only work with suppliers than can provide a steady, uniform, reliable product 24/7/365. Real food doesn’t work like that

3. Candy and Soda are cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetables. What do you think poor people will choose to eat?

4. Food industry claims that consumers should show personal responsibility when choosing what to eat are insidious.

5. Food has not gotten safer over the years. Not if a single burger can have meat from one thousand cows in it.

6. Really sad – the federal government does not have the right to recall contaminated meat off of supermarket shelves.

7. A ray of light – consumers, through personal preference, convinced Wal-Mart to switch to milk from cows who did not receive growth hormones.

8. Watch out for “food libel laws” – Industry will sue you if you don’t talk nice about food products. Example: Oprah Winfrey was engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the meat industry for saying she’d consider abstaining from burgers at the height of the mad cow scare a decade ago.

9. The legal fees for the movie were 3 times higher than all his previous films combined.

What to do at the supermarket:

Your choices are what ultimately fuel the food industry. By buying unprocessed foods, mostly from the supermarket perimeter, you will avoid many of the pitfalls of modern industrialized food-like substances.

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  • Alana

    The sad thing about this is that there is so much more scary stuff in food than this movie can even begin to document. Here are some things you should investigate for your readers.

    Ben and Jerry’s and Breyers ice cream owned by major food and personal care products multinational Unilever contains genetically mutated fish proteins.

    All that Horizon organic milk comes from a huge factory farm in Colorado where thousands of cows suffer in confinement. They are knee deep in their own waste and all of that gets on the udder where their milk comes out.

    The dairy farms use hormones to synchronize the menstreul cycles of the cows so they can get them all pregnant at once. That makes our daughters have prematurely over enlarged breasts. Then the cows have their babies and all the boy babies are taken away and killed. The girls are pulled away and raised for the same miserable life as their mothers. Visit a big dairy farm, you’ll see it.

    Fruits contain terminator technology. Seedless watermelon and grapes are rendered sterile through genetic manipulation. Farmers have to go back to the big corporations to get new seeds each year.

    Its the same thing with corn. It’s all hybrids. You can save the seeds for the next year, but they dont’ grow very well and you have to go back and buy more.

    All bananas come from genetic clones!

    Maybe you are a foodie and like fine wine . . . the grape vines are fused to roots from completely different species, talk about frankenfood! This is so unnatural.

    Even organic food often comes from crops that have been genetically modified by gamma radiation. It’s called mutagenesis. They just keep making random mutations until they get something that seems new and different that they like and go with it. People shopping at Whole Foods are putting this stuff in their bodies and don’t even know it!

    Vegetable crops are fertilized with fecal matter. Think about that next time you eat a salad.

    Almost none of the produce in the grocery story, even if it is supposedly organic, can be found in nature. Think about that. Even all those fresh fruits and veggies have been tampered with. Nothing we eat is the way nature made it unless we go and get it from the wild and grow it ourselves.

  • http://www.squidoo.com/Food-inc-documentary cindy

    I LOVED this documentary! Wonderful! I wrote a whole article about it.