Food Inc – Exposing the Industrialized Food System

There is a spiderweb of roads and train tracks all around the country moving corn from where it’s being grown to these CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). Cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn. They are designed by evolution to eat grass. And the only reason we feed them corn is because corn is really cheap and corn makes them really fat quickly. So you feed corn to cattle. And e-coli, which is a very common bug, evolves. And a certain mutation occurs. And a strain called E. Coli 0157:H7 appears on the world stage. And it’s the product of the diet we’re feeding cattle on feedlots, and it’s the product of feedlot life. The animals stand ankle deep in their manure all day long, so that if one cow has it the other cows will get it.

For years during the Bush administration, the Cheif of Staff at the USDA was the former chief lobbyist to the beef industry in Washington. The head of the FDA was the former executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association. These regulatory agencies are being controlled by the very companies that they’re supposed to be scrutinizing.

Many of the illegal immigrants coming to America were corn farmers in Mexico. NAFTA led to a flooding of the Mexican market with cheap American corn. It’s put more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers out of work. They couldn’t compete with this cheap corn coming from America. So what happened to those million and a half Mexican farmers? Meat packers like IBP, National Beef, and Monford began actively recruiting in Mexico. Companies advertised on the radio and the newspapers. IBP set up a bus service in Mexico to bring workers into the united States. For years the government turned a blind eye to the recruitment of immigrants to the meat packing industry, but now when there’s an anti-immigrant movement, they’re cracking down all of the sudden, but they’re not cracking down on these companies. No, the government is cracking down on the workers.

Immigration agents are arresting Smithfield workers at this trailer park. This is an agreement between Smithfield and immigration authorities. They can get rid of 15 workers a day, but you don’t see any massive raids. That way it doesn’t affect the production line.

The way the system appeared to work to me was Lady Justice has the scales, and you piled cash on the scales, and the one that piled the most cash on the scales and hired the most experts and ones most willing to tell the biggest lies, that was the winner. That seems to be how our justice system functions now. It’s terrible. How can a farmer defend himself against a multinational corporation like Monsanto?

These companies fight tooth and nail against labeling. The fast food industry fought against giving you the calorie information. They fought against telling you if there is trans fat in your food. The meat packing industry for years prevented country of origin labeling. They fought not to label genetically modified foods, and now 70% of processed food in the supermarket has some genetically modified ingredient. I think it’s one of the most important battles for consumers to fight is the right to know what’s in their food and how it was grown. Not only do they not want you to know what’s in it, they have managed to make it against the law to criticize their products.

In Colorado it’s a felony if you’re convicted under a veggie libel law, so you could go to prison for criticizing the ground beef that’s being produced in the State of Colorado. There is an effort in several farm states to make it illegal to publish a photo of any industrial food operation, any feedlot operation. At the same time they’ve also gotten bills passed that are called cheeseburger bills that make it very very difficult for you to sue them.