Food Inc Essay

Food Inc. opens in an Ameri skunk supermarket and draws attention to the unnatural nature of year- locomote tomatoes and boneless printing. It pulls aside the shroud that is concealing the truth about forage from the consumer. After the brief intro, the word picture shifts its focus to the legislateic of fast food and its impact on the meat industries. Fast food virtually started with McDonalds. When they decided to simplify their menu and conduct employees that repeated one task over and over for minimum wage, the number was the fast food phenomenon that swept the United States, and then the world.Today, McDonalds is the largest purchaser of beef and potatoes in the United States, and is one of the largest purchasers of pork, chicken, tomatoes, and apples. Though an unintentional consequence, this has had a drastic impact on the way all food is processed. The top four meat packers now control over 80% of the market, the Tyson heap beingness the largest of them all. The d ocumentary next takes us to a Chicken advance in Kentucky and explains that, since the 1950s, chickens stick doubled in size, and they reach that incredible size in half the time it use to take them to reach their more(prenominal) natural size.Chickens today are genetically modified to have big breasts in response to the consumer preference for white meat. The chickens grow at such a rate that their bones and organs cant prolong up with the rapid growth of the muscles, or the meat. The original farmer that was followed in the documentary was unable to take the filmmakers inside the chicken houses. After being visited multiple times by Tyson representatives, the farmer informed the filmmakers that he would be unable to escort them inside.After a long search, a cleaning lady finally stepped forward and agreed to take the filmmakers inside an overly-crowded coop and merchantman the veil of the modern chicken attention. The next veil that is lifted by the film is that of the co rn industry. give can be chemically engineered into m either an(prenominal) different products, such as the extremely unhealthy high-fructose corn syrup. Corn costs more to make than it is worth, so it is subsidized by the government, load-bearing(a) even more of its use. Corn is the number one grain used to feed animals for slaughter.Feeding cows corn instead of their natural pabulum lead to the unintentional creation of 157H7 E. coli, a deadly bacteria that can kill. The film reveals how food standards have dropped, with only 9,164 safety inspections from the FDA each year as compared to over 50,000 in 1972. The food industry has become unify to the point of a few companies having a great deal of mightiness and influence via the government. The USDA is no longer able to shutdown plants with begrime meat. A bill titled Kevins Law had the intent of changing that, but, after 6 years, the bill still has not been passed.Food companies have made some attempts to reduce E. coli b y cleaning their meats in an ammonium hydroxide solution. However, unhealthy food is being subsidized and contributing to American fleshiness and the rise of type 2 diabetes in adolescents. The film then travels to a hog processing plant that kills 32,000 hogs a day. They expose the strategy of the caller-up to hire extremely poor and illegal immigrants who cant give to quit their jobs, despite problems with frequent infections of the hands and fingernails, a side effect of poor sanitation standards.We then discover that it has been legal to patent spirit since the 1980s, and learn about the company Monsantos round up unsusceptible soybean that now makes up 90% of the soybean market. Monsanto systematically sues offenders that exit copyright laws. Private investigators are hired to monitor and find any infringements. Even if infringement was unavoidable, smaller, neighboring farmers are forced to purchase the round up resistant seeds. Monsanto has a great deal of political in fluence, with closedown ties to both parties.Both the Bush and Clinton administrations had close ties with Monsanto. Only the consolidated advocator of consumers can overcome the political and economical power of the large food processing companies. We owe it to ourselves to use that power to demand healthier, organic foods. In a free economy, the consumer has the ultimate power. Just as the tobacco industry was exposed and its power drastically reduced, so too can the nonstandard food industry be wrangled into submission.