“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000…”

– Michael Pollan, author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”

Written in 1906, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair ends with the main character Jurgis realizing the workers, not a few wealthy capitalists should own factories and plants. It seems as if that imagination and hope still exists today…

Food, Inc., exploits the fact in which US agricultural businesses are and have been producing more food on less land at a cheaper cost than anywhere else in the world. The film recounts the consequences of our actions, including sick animals, animal cruelty, environmental degradation, obesity, and diabetes to name a few. Major corporations are more focused on low costs and high profits as the supreme value in food production instead of the simple health and moral costs. The people making these irrational and inhumane decisions are small, powerful groups of capitalists, not the farmers and food workers. The drastic disconnect between the average American and the food he or she eats is clouded by marketing tactics and lobbying in the agricultural industry.

The film shows testimonies from farmers and footage of meat-packing plants secretly shot by workers, illegal immigrants being hired as employees then arrested in the middle of the night for being illegal in the first place, consumer advocates and a few people in the industry that shared their opinion knowing the potential consequences. Major food corporations Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue and Smithfield all declined to share their side of the story even though the film focused mainly on those businesses. These organizations also used their economic powers to discourage farmers from speaking up about how their businesses are run. The film chose these businesses carefully because of their gigantic clout. For example, Smithfield’s Tar Heel, N.C., plant is now the largest slaughterhouse plant in the world.

The film continually showed animal cruelty – inhumane actions, illness, and a lack of cleanliness – within the farms and plants. The filmmakers craft a narrative that is educational and inspiring. Not only are there interviews of Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Joel Salatin of Virginia’s Polyface Farms but also Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her two-and-a-half year old son to E. coli. Her son, Kevin ate a hamburger from McDonald’s and died 12 days later. Kowalcyk then became an advocate for reform in the beef industry. She fights for food safety and for the USDA to exercise its power to shut down plants which repeatedly produce contaminated meats. The drive of the film is through activists like Kowalcyk and alternative businesses that strive to make American food safe and nutritious.

Maryland chicken farmer Carole Morison was interviewed about animal-raising procedures forced upon workers by corporations like Purdue. She was brave enough to show what no other Perdue farmers wanted to admit was happening to their livestock – antibiotics, high-tech breeding and overcrowding. Whereas Kentucky chicken-raiser Vince Edwards, a Tyson employee, approves of the corporate methodology. “The chicken industry came in here and it’s helped this whole community out,” he says, “and it’s all a science. They got it figured out… If you could grow a chicken in 49 days, why would you want one you gotta grow in three months? More money in your pocket.” It is this reduction in costs that forces farmers to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to meet corporate requirements while only earning as little as $18,000 a year.

Another prime example of corporate takeover was with seed cleaner Moe Parr of Indiana. He had been a farmer for twenty-five years, until Monsanto drove him out of business. Parr offered a service that tried to help farmers save sees, but under contracts farmers must sign when he buys the patented and modified seeds, Monsanto sued him. Parr could not afford to defend his actions against Monstanto’s deep pockets and he was forced to end his business.

The most emotional and destructive example the film exemplified was from a large, working Latino family who struggled to keep everyone fed as well as pay for the health costs from the father’s diabetes. They learned healthy eating was too expensive for them. A McDonald’s double cheeseburger, made from cows fed government subsidized chemicals to increase production and profits and E. coli-prone corn diets, was cheaper than a head of broccoli. Troy Roush, Vice President of the American Corn Growers Association. “In the United States today, 30 percent of our land base is being planted to corn. That’s largely driven by government policy, government policy that, in effect, allows us to produce corn below the cost of production. The truth of the matter is, we are paid to overproduce and it is caused by these large multinational interests… And the only reason we feed [cows] corn is because corn is really cheap and corn makes them fat quickly.”

“Eric Schlosser and I had been wanting to do a documentary version of his book Fast Food Nation, says director Kenner, “but things can change in this country. It changed against the big tobacco companies. We have to influence the government and readjust these scales back into the interests of the consumer. We did it before, and we can do it again.”

Brian Halweil wrote, Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in the Global Market. World, and he focuses on how people get their food now compared how we used to feed ourselves. Within the past forty years, international trade in food has tripled while our population has only doubled. In the United States, food travels at least 2,500 kilometers from farm to plate, a twenty-five percent increase from 1980. This is due to many factors but a few are transportation costs – gasoline is cheaper, longer storage and less costly shipping – and population demographics – more people are moving to cities and away from farmland and food production centers. It was major innovations in refrigeration and engineering after World War II that sparked the frozen food industry. Scientists also created techniques to control the ripening of fruit, vegetables, and other perishables, encouraging mass transportation and over-consumption.

Heavy transportation and engineering not only allow for corporate managing of mass products as shown in the film and article, but Halweil also points out its environmental effects. For example, the transcontinental head of lettuce is grown in Salinas Valley in California and when it is shipped 5,000 kilometers of Washington, D.C., it requires thirty-six times as much fossil fuel energy than it provides in food energy was delivered. That lettuce stays within the same continent, let alone the same country and the numbers are staggering. When that lettuce is shipped to the United Kingdom, the ratio of fuel energy to calories provided jumps to 127, remarkable. To be noted, most international food trade is by boat, with most domestic food trade done by rail or truck, all relatively energy-efficient forms of transportation. The climate-controlled airplane cargo has the largest effect on the environment.

This expansion of globalization and international trade comes at a high cost. Not necessarily to the Wal-Marts and Tyson distributors, but to the home-grown food providers. It wasn’t long after international conglomerates became successful when neighborhood butchers and bakers began closing shop. The larger companies can offer lower prices, one-stop shopping, and they have financial reserves to weather global pricing wars and economic clumps, something small businesses can’t afford. Besides the economic and environmental consequences of big business and globalization, international trade replaces the human connections of shopping for food. The local butcher knows your name and your local baker knows your favorite kind of cake. Your favorites are now displaced by government-subsidized corporate requirements and standards. But the biggest loss is now the money is no longer being circulated locally to encourage innovation and prosperity. In the meat industry alone, “One firm controls 60 percent of chicken purchases in Central America. In the United States, four companies control over 80 percent of beef packing, and five companies pack 75 percent of the pork.” (Hailwel, Page 25)

The solution is not complete food self-sufficiency but less dependency on international markets. There is enough food to serve one-and-a-half times the global population but millions of people ends their days hungry. Greater self-sufficiency can buffer nations against corporate conglomerates and instead, focus on those suffering from hunger. We must rebuild our local food systems by encouraging small business shopping by attending local food markets. “A study by the New Economics Foundation in London found that every £10 spent at a local food business is worth £25 for the local area, compared with just £14 when the same amount is spent in a supermarket—that is, a pound (or dollar, peso, or rupee) spent locally generates nearly twice as much income for the local economy.” (Hailwel, Page 28) That number is exponential when placed in communities vastly employed by agriculture.

A certain amount of food trade is natural and beneficial but instead of a handful of multinationals capturing much of the planet’s food trade it should be thousands or millions of local businesses.