More Food for Thought

I found a lot to like in the three pieces we read for today, Schlosser, Kenner and Lappe respectively. The three authors all focused on more humanitarian efforts to solve what some might think is just a problem of where our food comes from. Despite some incendiary satirical tactics I may have employed in earlier posts may have suggested, I do really have at least a modicum of faith left in humanity. Especially when authors like Eric Schlosser, who have "made it" in the literary world, can still take the time not only to denounce the Industrial Food Machine's corporate greed and the political elite that defend it, but to remind readers that it is up to each one of us to look out for one another. Schlosser states that "bringing healthy food into public schools...creat[ing] a health care system that looks after everybody...rais[ing] wages.." (16) are all efforts to clean up our dinner plates of chemicals and sad dead animals. We need to look at this issue from an expanded and thoughtful point of view and "eliminate some of the factors that keep the price of [food] artificially low...[thereby improving] the health of consumers, livestock and the land" (16). This is excellent advice, though it may sound a bit too easy, dare I say utopian, for some.

That is where Anne Lappe comes in with a tangible solution. Small-scale, organically sustainable farms. Indeed, if more people grew their own crops/cattle organically, we could have a much healthier biosphere. She states that "converting 10,000 medium-sized farms to organic would store as much as carbon in the soil as we would save in emissions if we took one million cars off the road" (115). Though this doesn't seem like an awful lot, the nature of business is expansion. If we started with 10,000 farms becoming less reliant on a centralized system of huge factory farms, the trend would undoubtably spread. We all have to eat. We have simply been trained by corporations to do it their way, cheaply and like machines.

Corporations, of course, won't be keen on the idea. Kenner blew my mind with his discussion of "veggie libel" laws challenging enough to take media moguls like the ever-infallible Oprah to the bank. This is quite a damning set of circumstances wherein a victim of the food industry cannot speak of its ills without millions of dollars being spent in legal fees. What if your car exploded and killed your family but you couldn't report your choice of another brand of car to the media? It's odd that the food system should have to answer to different sets of rules than other forms of consumer products in America. Anyone have thoughts on this?

I think it is laudable that these three authors are attempting to open up the discourse to all aspects of human interaction and stressing that if we are equitable to one another in health care, farming, education, etc. we can hope to change the way we eat. Eating is essential. It is a wonder it is so hard to get people to do it right. Perhaps citing figures of diseases like obesity and heart attacks while providing tangible solutions is a great way to start.

Food Inc revelations

In a lot of ways, Film is the fast food of media (if you don't count TV, which occupies its own insidious category in my mind, but I digress).Films deliver succinct messages that can be easily digested by large groups of people who don't want to meander through a mammoth tome to get to the meat of an argument. In this way, Food Inc does an excellent job of boiling down Pollan's seminal Omnivore's Dilemma into what amounts to be a sum of its parts, a tv dinner portion of a 12-course gustatory delight, made suitable for mass distribution. This, in and of itself, is actually a pretty good idea. As we talked about in class, most of the willfully ignorant American populace don't read (a mind-boggling, outrageous 3% read?!!). This is a sad state of affairs, considering that reading is the only certifiable way to grow more intelligent...save, I suppose, documentary films.

The film, or the first half anyway, does a satisfactory job of highlighting the main tenets of Pollan's message; Marketing the pastoral fantasy is a tactic used by Corporate Giants to convince people that their foods are farm-fresh while at the same time allowing said corporations to maintain cruel factory farms to assemble dangerous foods behind the scenes using ammonia, antibiotics, cramped hellish conditions for animals , corn, growth hormones, corn, more antibiotics, ad naseum to allow for "cheap" meals. The film itself, from its opening titles of glossy names on equally glossy products, is a commodified entity. Therein lies the rub. To appeal to a wide audience base, the descriptions of Pollan watching a chicken get slaughtered are gone, replaced by the repeated imagery of chickens strung up on a processing line in Christ-like (albeit inverted and headless) sacrificial poses. There is still a healthy amount of Gothification here, especially a particularly touching segment where a young boy named Kevin contracts a deadly strain of bacteria (E-coli 015787) and dies within 12 days. We are treated to repeated images of him as a happy scamp who met an untimely death. This is depressing stuff, to be sure.

Equally depressing are the flurry of factoids that jounce about the screen, vying for our attention. 1 central control center for the 13 major beef producers in the country? These kind of frightening mechanically estranged abattoirs are the sort of death sheds we'd expect to see in Hostel or the fading Saw franchise. A man at a computer terminal watches as cows in various states are carved up and liquified. Yum. The problem is, apart from one nasty slice of a mechanical saw, we, as viewers, are kindly spared by the filmmakers. Elsewhere we learn that Americans gulp down an unprecedented 200 lbs of meat a year, as much as 75% of which is treated with an ammonia-based meat filler. Mm-mm good, just like momma used to secrete from her poison glands! Absolutely sickening. Let's not forget too about the fact that 1 in every 3 American boy born after 2000 will have Type-2 Diabetes. While not a death sentence, persay, this is ample evidence of an epidemic in our midst, one that is bolstered by the public's predilection for maintaining a veil of gallumphing ignorance. PETA is constantly under fire (or at least dismissed) for disseminating information and or photographs of animals being slaughtered, rotting, gutted, their entrails violently flung away across shit-smeared floors, their drooling faces hacked apart and burned...for fear that the public will get all queasy. Is it worse to show these images or to hide from them?

My problem with Food INC is that it is a bit too glossy, a bit too neutered for its own good. Sure the images it does choose to show have an impact. I shook my head in disdain more than once. And yet, call me a masochist, but I am left wanting more scenes like the gaping, bile excreting hole in the side of the cow where the fellow could delightfully, and as he claimed "painlessly", empty a cow's rumen. In the same way that Morgan Spurlock's cultural touchstone Super Size Me didn't have quite enough bite (though it did lead to the phasing out of Super Sized meals, which is good), as it didn't stop me from lounging in gluttonous repair beneath the golden arches, this film doesn't seem to push the discourse far enough. Let's get into the abattoir. Let's see the dying kids. Let's push and push until the audience is screaming, writhing with the intention of murdering the board of directors at Cargill or ADM. But, of course, this sort of rebel-rousing is invariably poo-pooed if the film makers want to reach a broad audience, because, once again, we're faced with the age old Orwellian conundrum of Ignorant Bliss. We don't want to harbor these rash, irresponsible feelings toward our fellow man, neither the homely blue-collar slaughterhouse worker nor his conniving white collar boss. But, hell, animals are expendable, right? So who cares if they are savagely mutilated for our Big Macs. Who gives a shit.

To steal a page from our old friend Jonathan Swift, I'm advocating we start eviscerating and serving up the executives at Tyson, not as punishment for their nefarious business practices, but because they are corn-fed products too, why not let them share in the misery of Pollan's #534 or poor dead Kevin and his grieving mother whose pleas to congress are shut down with absolute firm authority. If 30% of the landscape is devoted to corn, just think of the glut of the market if we shift the rest of the landscape (all those metal office silos...mmmm) into the abattoir for thanksgiving. What's the difference? We're all animals, after all.