My wife forced me to watch Food Inc. last weekend.
One word. WOW.
If you have any inkling of wonder or curiousity about where your food comes from, you should watch this film.
I know I personally complained about the cost when my wife has us buy everything organic and from farmer’s markets, etc. Never again. And I can’t say never as the situation may dictate, but I will try to never eat at a fast food restaurant again.
Blatz PM’ed me to see if I thought this topic would be too political and offered to delete it if it was. At this point, I’m willing to let the post stay. Please be courteous and respectful in your discussion, or it’ll be gone in the blink of an eye!
Personally, we either grow a large % of the veg we eat, or buy organic, local stuff. Chicken is about the only meat we eat, and we buy locally raised (within a few miles, actually) chicken. Besides any potential environmental or health benefits, it simply tastes better to me. I eat fast food only maybe 2-3 times a year when I’m stuck at work with a short break and have no other choice.
So it’s about general food from the grocery store like regular canned corn vs orgranic canned corn or mainly about fast food?
Its real focus is the giant scale industrial food production system we have going in this country, both meat and veg. If you’ve read any Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), it won’t come as any surprise. (Particularly since he was a consultant and narrator as was Eric Schlosser - author of Fast Food Nation)
On the one hand you can see it as a scathing indictment of the impact of the whole massive “cheap” food chain we have going here and on the other you can see it as yet another “hippie” attack on American businesses.
Personally, I think what’s happening in food is scary from a health, ecological and even flavor perspective. About the one good thing you can say is: “at least it’s cheap!”
thanks denny - I hope we can keep it from being derailed (and deleted).
ndcube - its actually about both - its really amazing to see how the advent of fast food has driven the industrial manufacturing of food, meat in particular. but as a result of the powerful hand of fast food, it has also changed the way the food is grown that we buy at the local grocery store.
unfortunately, this change has made the wrong food choices very cheap (dollar menu at McDs) and has forced the hand, so to speak, of a lot of lower income families. the increasing frequency of diabetes is one negative result.
I’m going to check out Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation next - the authors of those books contributed/narrated the movie.
I encourage everyone to at least watch it - and take what you want away from it. I know I personally am very concerned about what I eat, so this has naturally swayed me in one direction, but others may have a different perspective.
Yeah, for example I saw a show on discovery about how they raise chickens/turkeys in mass quantities which was not too pleasant (I won’t go into details). On the other hand my Thanksgiving turkey was something like 29 cents a pound.
It’s on Netflix if anyone’s interested.
If it’s any consolation, when we run out of oil in a few years everyone will be eating local.
I too am concerned about what I’m eating as well although we don’t buy much organic stuff for financial reasons.
I’m more concerned with where this is heading. The problem is that market forces themselves won’t correct the problem of overly cheap food. For that to happen, food needs to be priced correctly. I.e. producers of food that promotes health problems should pick up part of the future health care bill. If ground beef was $10/lb, many of us would reconsider having it as often as we do. And if the tax that makes it so expensive would be based on its fat content then you would see that the lean beef would be cheaper and farmers might have a stronger incentive to raise leaner cows and pigs.
In the end this means more government intervention with more taxes on things. I do understand that that is something that is not very popular with many but how else can we move the industry into a sustainable direction.
By nature we humans love to eat. It’s only our consciousness that helps us make the right choices.
Kai
I’ll have to check it out. It’s not a blood bath type film…? I can’t watch the slaughtering of livestock…it makes me ill.
NOoooooooooo! (Just being dramatic) Bring back the heritage breeds before they were laboratized into what they are today. We don’t need leaner meat, we need natural meat,grassfed, pasture raised ( not pasturized or irradiated) 
. Eat smaller portions of the real, natural item that is way more nutritous and we’ll all be fine. If everybody chose the correct foods, the market would adjust. Unfortunately - cheap and plentiful is hard to get away from.
Fat is not bad for you. The wrong type of fat is, and for that matter too much of anything is not good for you.
-OCD
No, its not really that but it touches on the topic somewhat but more from a perspective of quantity over quality.
This film is basically about the fact that there are just a few top players that control the entire commercial food market and profit trumps safety and quality.
The Corporate America way of business in a nutshell.
Absolutely… on this. I like the Pollan philosophy of “proper” eating - “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
And hertiage breeds are part of that. Of course, I ain’t quite there yet.
The problem with cheap and easy is most folks (including myself) don’t exercise (or have) much more control over the food intake process than our beloved dogs do. Cheap and easy just makes it easier to shovel more and more calories down your gullet.
Another great read is “Mindless Eating” - That book is based on the reasearch of the Cornell and Brand Lab. Among some of the experiments they’ve run is the “endless soup bowl” that hooks a soup bowl up to a pot of soup that invisibly refills as a person eats. The results of comparing how much soup people ate (both with the endless bowl and without) and how “satisfied” they felt were astonishing.
I had a similar epiphany recently with wine glasses. I want 2 glasses of wine when I have some wine. I don’t drink very fast or with the intention of getting sloshed but 1 glass seems wrong - 2 just right. I switched from the modern Reidel glasses that could hold half a bottle plus - to some european crystal glasses that are WAY smaller. I’m still happy with 2 glasses of wine.
-OCD
Yeah, that’s exactly the sort of thing he talks about doing. We apparently make about 250 eating/drinking choices through the day, about 20 more than we did in the 50’s-60’s. By a choice he means the idea of “yes I’ll have a hersey’s kiss”. His argument is that for healthy eating (calorically speaking) we should really onl y focus on dropping 200-300 calories a day from those bad choices.
Another study in the book that cracked me up. They went and put candy dishes in an office at the secretaries desks and filled them with a known number of hersey’s kisses. Each evening they came back in and measured the number eaten and refilled the dishes. They experimented with placement and effect on quantity eaten. No big surprise then that the most were eaten when they were right on the desk. Fewer when moved to arm’s length and radically fewer when placed at 6 feet away. All of these subtle things including dish size (he mentions how much bigger dishes have become since the 70’s too) affect our food decisions.
I just read an article that talked about how dinner plates have gone from 9" to 11-12" over the last 30 years. Using a 9" plate pretty much cuts your calories in half since you can’t get as much food on it.
I’m currently reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma and just watched a documentary called King Corn (with brief commentary my Michael Pollan). It is definitely eye opening, to say the least.
Has anyone mentioned “Our Daily Bread”?
That one is really interesting. No narration makes it spooky, almost like a science fiction movie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozhr__b8OYc
Saw King Corn the other night (Netflix streaming is awesome!). Interesting to learn that most of the corn that is being grown is totally inedible. And, since “Super Size Me”, it’s been pretty easy to avoid the fast food meals.
Looking forward to watching Food, Inc.
I’m a pretty healthy eater (and, like Blatz, one of those fitness knucklehead guys). My big beef is with highly processed foods and I try to limit, as much as possible, the amount of processed food I eat everyday. I mostly eat fruits, vegetables and nuts all day long and then I eat one actual meal a day at supper time. I mostly stay away from breads and sugars (except sometimes a little in my coffee) and mostly avoid anything with more than two or three ingredients in the label during the day. And, during the week that includes beer. I drink very little alcohol, often none, Monday thru Friday.
At night we try to eat organic, but it simply isn’t possible to feed a family of four entirely organic. And my youngest son has a penchant for Kraft Mac and Cheese (and I admit, it can be quite tasty when paired with fish and broccoli ;) ). I also sometimes get a craving for a McDonald’s Hamburger - usually only two or three times a year, but when it happens I simply have to have one and I really don’t care how that sucker is made as long as no one has spit in it or dropped it on the floor (be nice to people at restaurants - always!).
I don’t exactly know what my point is, but I guess it has something to do with making healthy choices as much as possible during the day - but you gotta eat and you gotta feed the family too and sometimes you are just going to have to put something on the table that might not be 100% good for you, or might be made in a factory. At this point we are a one income family and we hit Costco for most of our meat purchases and it crosses my mind every time I buy a pack of chicken there how much junk those chicken are loaded up with, but it does taste good on the grill and I haven’t grown a third eye yet.
Stay away from sugars and highly processed food and make most of your food yourself and you are doing better than most Americans. But a frozen pizza from time to time isn’t going to hurt you any, even if that pepperoni has more ingredients than stars in the sky.