Food, Inc. (2008)

I've seen several documentaries about food and the food industry over the past year, one being the very biased Netflix documentary What the Health that basically tells you to go vegan unless you want to get all the illnesses you can think of, which is why I was a bit sceptical about Food, Inc. but I still decided to check it out.

Starting off by giving facts about how the majority of products we can find in a grocery store is modified, the film examines corporate farming in the United States and how these few big food corporations drastically changed the production of food as their sole goal is to produce large quantities of food at low costs which obviously means huge profits.

And that brings to another of the aspects of the food industry examined by Food, Inc., the disastrous effects that intensive farming has not only on aminals as they are very poorly treated and forced to eat foods they would not normally eat --cows are not supposed to eat corn but grass, but of course feeding them with modified and cheap corn that makes them grow faster is better than having them eat grass and grow much slower aka normally-- but also on the health and environmental risks it has, especially in slaughtering houses and livestock farming . While doing this, the documentary also shows that workers are being treated just as poorly as the animals.

Food, Inc. also shows how the American farmer is in trouble because of these corporations. Since these small farmers raise the animals with dignity and respect, their "products" are more expensive than corporates' foods and therefore people are less willing to buy them.

Magnolia Pictures

There's, however, something about Food, Inc. that really didn't work for me. Other than the fact that it often feels unfocused as it randomly jumps from a topic to another, at some point, it shows how hard it is to eat healthy on a budget. We see a Hispanic family buying a meal from Burger King and it's presented as if they didn't have another choice and forced to eat junk food because you can have an unhealthy burger for a dollar that will fill your stomach or a single healthy item at a market that won't fill your stomach. I know that vegetables aren't cheap --most of my groceries are vegetables so I know that-- but I also know that beans and grains are cheap and those definitely fill you. Also, the father of the family has diabetes and they complain about the fact that he has to take two pills and each cost over a hundred dollar so they once again are forced to pick whether they want to eat healthily or buy medicines they need to live. But isn't this mentality leading their kids to become diabetic as well?

With that being said, Food, Inc. still needs to be watched as it is a great eye-opener as it shows the cruel ways animals are treated, all the chemicals involved and how unnatural most foods nowadays are --although I'm pretty sure everybody already knows this in 2018--, and definitely makes you more conscious about the food you eat.