What is food? How would you define it? According to Wikipedia.org, it is any substance that is consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of animal or plant origin, and contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, minerals and fats. In normal language, it is food that gives us energy, fills our tummy when hungry and keeps us alive and healthy. But what if you realize that the food that is supposedly good and nutritional is actually detrimental to your health, the human race, the animals themselves; the entire world?
Food, Inc. is a documentary based on agriculture and farming, and business associated with them. It starts off with the ills in the corporate production of chicken, beef and pork. And then moves on to the industrial production of crops like soybean and corn, calling both these practices economically and environmentally unsustainable and violating basic dignity.
It revealed all the mysteries, which none of us take the time to unravel in this ‘tick-tock, running around the clock’ world. (How the animals are slaughtered probably isn’t a mystery though, not for many at least.) None of us know where our food comes from, and probably will never know in all our lifetime. We think that the milk comes from the cow farm, and chicken and the egg from the poultry farm, the corn from the corn farm etc. Obviously, we are wronged. It is all from the same place. We might think we are buying from ten different companies, the oranges from one, the bread from another, the jams from yet another and the list is enormous. But again, we are wronged – it’s all from one or two super giant conglomerates, which are basically doing a wee bit less than monopolizing the entire food industry, or in one way or another monopolizing our livelihood.
You night say, who cares! I am getting my food, which is healthy and cheap, why do I care whether I buy from one company or many? Well, if you took the time to watch Food, Inc. then you’d probably understand. Healthy – don’t ever dream this true. One tiny example - the cows that you relish as beef in your burger, stands in its manure all day, week, months long. The bacteria transfers from that one cow to another when they all get slaughtered cut with the same knife. And since they all come from the same company thus the same farm and one colossal factory; it transfers into thousands of cows, coming right down to your plate. Cheap – yes, at the cost of unhealthy food which is the reason for the increasing amount of diabetics, dirty food plus the indefinite exploitation of the humans in the factories, as well the animals which are treated as if their existence is unimportant, we, humans are their kings and they our slaves. The documentary raised a valid point, “If we treat animals so disgustingly, the time isn’t far that we would treat our, fellow humans is such as manner too.”
Vegetarians might go yippy-yay that plants are not subjected to such brutality and they eat the “good food.” Well, against all the pre-assumed beliefs, this is awfully wrong. Heavy duty crops such as soybeans and corn are subjected to the same horror too. Mass production, unruly industrial conditions, stuffed into cows, chicken and other animals. Well, cows were not born to eat corn; they were programmed to eat grass. While you might not think this is majorly atrocious, well just compare, you, an ordinary human eats grains, veggies, chicken, ham, and then you are forced to eat cheetahs, lets say. It doesn’t seem so bad in the case of cows probably because they cannot express their dissent.
You may call this biased, or the clichéd “presenting only one side of the argument,” but let me ask you this, why did the colossal corporations like Tyson decline to be interviewed? Why did they not represent their point, and prove it right? Why didn’t they stand up for what they do? Probably because they know that they are wronging humanity year after year.
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