The Low Quality Food Problem: Industrialization of our Food Supply and increasing Health Care Costs

Robert Kenner gives the American public a twenty-first century Upton-Sinclair-look at the industrial food system in his latest film, Food, Inc., and  never has the food in the U.S. seemed so unappetizing or so unsafe. Journalists and food experts, Eric Schlosser, and Michael Pollan weigh in with staggering statistics on today’s unsustainable food system, increasing rates of obesity-related diseases, and rising rates of food safety scares.

To connect the dots between government, large food corporations, food safety, obesity, and the environment, Kenner follows the individual stories of a fixed-income family financially torn between buying produce or diabetes medicine; the mother who advocates for increased FDA regulation after her son died from E. coli; the seed cleaner put out of business by the world’s largest soy bean company; the union president struggling to protect illegal immigrants working in food processing facilities; and many more. I consider myself knowledgeable about the specifics of the conventional food system and stay abreast of food politics, yet I was aghast at several points during the film. Our nation’s large-scale food system is on life support, our citizens are dying, and conditions won’t improve unless we demand change.   

We have the least expensive food at any time in the history of the world—less of our paycheck goes to food now than at any other time. At the same time, there is a very high cost of this food.

 Genetically modified organisms—the food industry says they’re good for you, but they’ll do everything possible to keep it off the label. RBST, the growth hormone for dairy cows—not only do they try to keep it off the label, they sue farmers who put on the label that their product doesn’t contain it. We should have the right to know what we are eating and we should have the right to make choices. If we don’t have access to that information, we can’t make the choices we want. The fact that we don’t is very surprising.

This system of low-cost food has become very expensive and it’s going to become even more expensive. People ask, "Is it a conspiracy between the pharmaceutical and the food companies?" Probably not.

We have a system that is not sustainable because it’s based on gasoline. Gasoline is a diminishing product. When the price of oil spikes again, this food is going to become very expensive because all of the chemicals that go in to food are gasoline based, and gasoline is needed for the tractors and transportation. Twenty to twenty-five percent of our carbon footprint goes into growing and transporting the food. Our industrial food system is dependent on polluting the water and the land and robbing the earth of nutrients. We have to think how to replace it or transform it.

Food companies are consciously designing food to be addictive. You can be sued for disparaging a food product if it affects their profits.

All the A and B students have left the farms to become lawyers or work at hedge funds. They don’t make things. It’s the D and F students, or really only illegal immigrants, who are growing and producing this food because the jobs have become so unpleasant, so low paying, and so dangerous nobody with rights would take these jobs." We now have a slave workforce that is growing our food, and you can tell a lot about a society by who grows the food. We had citizen farmers who fought the revolution. Now, we have indentured servants with no rights to speak out against the system.

We get to vote three times a day with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We have to start by buying local foods, going to farmers markets and supporting the smaller farmers, buying more organics (which is the fastest growing segment of the food world). Consumers have a lot more power than we think.