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Patricia Hall
Professor Holloway
English 2010
6 April 2014
Film Review: Food, Inc.
With the number of children struggling with obesity growing every year it is vital that we
look for every possible solution to stop this epidemic. In the documentary Food, Inc. Robert
Kenner proposes the idea that the practices used in agribusiness is what causes the consumers to
be unhealthy. According to the movie 1 in 3 children born after 2000 will have early onset
diabetes and among minorities that number jumps to 1 in 2. Moreover, it states that the practices
used in making this unhealthy food are also cruel to animals and that we need to make serious
changes to our current system if we want be healthier.
The movie starts out by
stating that gone are the days of
green pastures and red barns that
many Americans picture when they
think of where the animals they eat
are raised. Small family farms are
being replaced with huge industrial farms that are more like a factory than a farm. The movie
goes on to state that there is this deliberate veil, this curtain, between us and where our food is
coming from. The industry doesnt want you to know where your food is coming from because if
you knew, you might not want to eat it. That statement really draws you in as a viewer and
makes you want to yank that curtain back and see what you have been missing. However
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according to an interview the New York Times did with Dr. Nina Fedoroff, a member of the
National Academy of Sciences, having small family farms is impractical in the day and age due
to the supply need. Dr. Fedoroff states that If everybody switched to organic farming, we
couldnt support the earths current population maybe half. (Dreifus 2008)
The first portion of the movie
shows how chickens are raised in the
U.S.. In the 1950s chicken were raised
for 70 days and then they were
slaughtered. As the demand for chickens
grew they made changes to the chickens
diets so that now they grow for 45 days and are double in size. This growth is so rapid that the
chicken cannot go more than two or three steps at a time because they cannot support their own
weight. They are forced to grow in cramped chicken coops with no exposure to sunlight. After
the release of this movie a group of food production companies, headed by the American Meat
Institute, created a website called SafeFoodInc.org as a rebuttal to the claims that were presented
in the film. The sites states the keeping birds inside a house protects them from predators such
as hawks and foxes (Safe Food Inc 2009) One of the ways they get the chickens to grow so
much is to feed them lots and lots of corn.
Corn is more of the most grown and eaten things in the U.S.. With scientist constantly
finding new ways to engineer corn to incorporate corn into our foods it is now in most items you
can get at the supermarket. There were some shocking items that had corn in them that I never
would have guessed. Those items include: ketchup, cheese, Twinkies, batteries, peanut butter,
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Cheez-its, salad dressing, Coke, jelly, Sweet & Low, syrup, juice, Kool-Aid, charcoal, diapers,
Motrin, and meat.
Corn is also the main ingredient in feed for animals and because it is so cheap that is what
keeps meat prices lower. The movie states that cows digestive systems do not like corn, they are
made to eat grass but we feed them corn because it is cheap and help make them fatter quicker.
Moreover, the movie goes on to say that because their digestive systems are not made for
breaking down corn they are more likely to get illness such as e coli. However, according to an
article by Penn States College of Agricultural Sciences, there is no evidence whatsoever that
grass-fed beef has any advantage for safety, human health, or impact on the environment than
grain-fed beef. Both types of beef deliver the important factors of nutrition in the human diet of
protein, iron, and zinc in equal proportions. (Comerford 2010) The movie also states that
because so many cows are cut and ground up into one batch of ground meat it is very easy so one
sick cow to contaminate hundreds of pounds of ground meat. The movie told the story of a
young boy who had a hamburger that contained e coli and died within 12 days. According to
MeatSafety.org the amount of e coli in ground beef has reduced by 72% from 2000-2010. (Meat
Safety 2014) The movie states that to reduce such incidents many producers now add ammonia
to their ground meats to kill bacteria. It is very odd to hear that they put in such chemicals into
the food we eat. If a child grabs a bottle of ammonia you automatically grab it from their hands
and take it away but it is ok to hand them a hamburger.
I was really shocked from what I saw in this movie. I previously thought I had a pretty
good idea how the animals I ate where raised. I grew up in a very small town in central Arkansas
and my great grandparents owned a farm. The hundreds of cows they owned were on a large plot
of land and roamed and ate grass. The thousands of chickens were is huge coops with screens for
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sunlight and they could not only support their own weight and take more than two steps but they
would run so fast you had to corner them to catch them. I was naive and thought that was what
the average farm is like and all animals are raised like that. This film really opened my eyes and
forced me to really examine what I eat and what I buy. If we are all more conscience of what we
are putting into our bodies and we told large agribusiness that we want things to change we could
really made a difference in our lives and those who come after us. I recommend this movie to
anyone who wants to see how the food you eat was actually grown.


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Work Cited
Comerford, John Telling the Grass-Fed Beef Story Penn State Extension 21 June 2010. Web
29 April, 2014
Dreifus, Claudia. "An Advocate for Science Diplomacy." The New York Times 18 Aug. 2008.
Web 29 April, 2014
Meat Safety Charts E. Coli Prevalence Meat Safety 5 Jan, 2014. Web 29 April, 2014
Safe Food Inc Myths and Facts Safe Food Inc 8 Feb 2009. Web 29 April, 2014