FarmApartment

If we are, as the adage goes, what we eat, then most of us are multinational industrial Agri-corporations.  So says Robert Kenner and Michael Pollan in their enthralling, important documentary about our Brave New World of farming, Food Inc.

The California Endowment hosted a screening on Tuesday night as part of a panel called Greening The Food Desert.  Before the film, Market Makeovers did an inspiring presentation of their work.  They train high-school kids in South Los Angeles to “makeover” their neighborhood corner stores that only sell liquor and candy by installing produce sections. Additionally, they educate the students in how to to document the entire process and make videos which they can then use as marketing tools for their program.  Pretty genius.

After the presentation, the lights went down, the film began and the dark reality of our industrialized food system began to reveal itself.  Very.  Disturbing.

The filmmakers did an excellent job of clearly laying out the complex landscape of how corporations control our food and why it got to be this way.  I took pages of notes, but really, you should just go out and see the documentary for yourself.  It will fundamentally change the way you think about food.

Below are my thoughts on the issues raised about the meat industry.  Check back later for my thoughts on how our produce is grown. Please indulge the following rant.

There’s a reason man didn’t design the planet. What with our greed and small imaginations, we would never have been able to come up with the intricate ecosystem in which everything interconnects and is dependent on each other.  Now agri-business has put that ecosystem into factories and labs and transformed it into something truly grotesque. Then they stomp around the planet and brainwash us into believing that what they’re serving up is “food”.

But it isn’t food, it’s money, and money tastes terrible!

I’m a meat-eater and don’t have a philosophical problem with the idea that humans eat animals.  However, it’s morally imperative to treat the animals with respect, to honor them by giving them the lives that nature intended for them.  To let them exist as they are meant to exist.  By doing so, we acknowledge that they, like us, are living creatures.  It is this life-essence that connects us, and contributes to the nourishment we get from the food animals provide.

Rather than honoring this connection, Agribusiness “sanitizes” this concept right out of our profit-driven food system.  They have instead opted for a monstrous fun-house mirror reflection of Nature, an ecosystem of their own invention, that exists to line the pockets of a few and throw toxic food at the masses.

The gruesome footage of farms where the animals are raised, the slaughterhouses where they’re killed and the plants where their meat is processed paints a nightmarish picture of this abhorrent state of affairs.

The animals are shoved together by the thousands, living in their own feces, collapsing under the weight of their bodies bio-engineered to develop the most meat over the shortest period of time.  Then they are taken to slaughterhouses where low-wage, mostly undocumented workers are treated only slightly better then the animals they’re killing.  The meat goes to a processing plant where thousands of carcasses hang from hooks circling around the factory on byzantine configuration of conveyor belts.  Before being packaged, the meat is often sprayed with ammonia to kill any bacteria that developed during its so called “life.”

And then it ends up in the supermarket at cheap, cheap, cheap prices.

The most horrifying footage obtained with hidden cameras was of the Smithfield hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Smithfield is the world’s largest pork producer and processor.

Many believe the Smithfield hog farm in Perote, Veracruz Mexico is ground zero for the 2009 Swine Flu outbreak.

At the Tar Heel plant featured in the film, they slaughter 2000 pigs an hour.  Low-wage workers are bused in from a 150 mile radius, because most people, no matter how desperate, will not work there.  The people who do become employees don’t last long.   The appalling working conditions are dehumanizing.  Often they suffer from diseases contracted by the bacteria of handling the guts of that many hogs.  It is common for their fingernails to fall off.

The ghoulish cacophony of thousands of filthy, feces-covered pigs squealing as they were being shoved toward the Kill Floor is something that I will never forget.  These practices must be stopped.

Polyface Farm in Virginia is offered up as a refreshing contrast.  On their website they describe themselves as “ a family owned, multi-generational, pasture-based, beyond organic, local-market farm and informational outreach in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.”

Their machine?  A grass field.  That’s right.  They send their cows into a grass field.  The cows eat the grass.  They poop.  The farmers send in the chickens who eat the gifts left by the cows.  They poop.  Then the pigs come in and eat everything else.

The animals themselves are the machines.  Nature has already invented all the technology we need to produce our meat and vegetables.

It is madness that we have given our bodies over to these agri-corporations.  Food Inc. underscored the necessity of acquiring our food with the utmost awareness and to find the closest connection we can to the source of our food.

The urban homesteading movement is clearly a reflection of the public’s rightful distrust of our destructive system of food production.

So what can we do?  The power of consumer opinion will go a long way toward changing these practices.  If you think it’s hopeless to go against these mega-corporations, the filmmakers ask us to look at what happened to Big Tobacco.  Demand sustainable food at your local supermarket.  Grow our own food when possible, support local farmers through CSA’s and farmer’s markets, buy free-range organic sustainably raised meat and dairy products, get politically involved.

Honor your food.