tagged w/ 10 Billion Animals Slaughtered for food in the US per year
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'Food, Inc.' offers plenty to chew on _ if you don't lose your appetite
You put food in your mouth every day. But do you know exactly what you're consuming when you pick up chicken breasts at the grocery store or drive though a fast-food restaurant for a cheeseburger? Or do you even bother to care?...
Wal-Mart, the Lucifer of multinational corporations in many liberal eyes, sees the fiscal sense in stocking an increasingly wide array of organic foodstuffs, consumer habits truly are changing. Not fast enough, though, for documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner, whose eye-opening "Food, Inc." should win a few hearts and minds regarding what we put in our stomachs.
Several things -- too many, probably -- are going on in "Food, Inc.," all connected. Kenner begins by tracing the impact of 20th Century American fast food on industrialized food production, and notes that when McDonald's brought factory assembly-line strategies into practice, everything changed. McDonald's became a universe of beef-purchasing power unto itself. Their cows, like so many millions of other feedlot residents, consume corn instead of grass; the humans in our increasingly obese nation eat a ton of corn as well, courtesy of high-fructose, heavily subsidized corn syrup (found in everything).
As a Brooklyn, N.Y., doctor in another food doc, "King Corn," put it: American food policy ensures that "we subsidize the Happy Meals -- but we don't subsidize the healthy ones."
Are the federal regulatory and protection agencies doing enough to keep us safe from E. coli outbreaks and the like? The film answers that one with a firm "no." Does eating organic food lead to a healthier diet and a healthier environment?
The film got virtually no cooperation from representatives of the dominant players in industrial food production, including Tyson (we see a chicken processing factory in full swing), Monsanto (whose strong-arm business practices come off very, very badly) and others.
As a result, "Food, Inc." is a rangy, well-articulated essay rather than a compelling point-counterpoint. Kenner can be accused of substituting surface tension, with threatening music cues riding in on almost every sequence, for a higher brand of dialectical tension -- the accused getting time, and room, to debate their accusers.
The most eloquent arguments in "Food, Inc." belong to Michael Pollan, who wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and who served as project consultant. "Fast Food Nation" author Eric Schlosser is onscreen a lot as well.
MPAA rating: PG (for some thematic material and disturbing images)
Running time: 1:33
Featuring: Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation"); Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma"); Gary Hirschberg (Stonyfield Farms); Joe Salatin (Polyface Farms)
Directed by: Robert Kenner; produced by Kenner and Elise Pearlstein. A Magnolia Pictures release.'Food, Inc.' offers plenty to chew on _ if you don't lose your appetite
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The escalating costs of corn and soybeans and the current credit crunch are forcing widespread cutbacks in the number of animals raised for food.
For the animals and caring consumers, such cuts are long overdue.
The 10 billion animals killed for food in the U.S. each year are caged and crowded, deprived and drugged, manhandled and mutilated. At the slaughterhouse, they may be scalded, bled, skinned and dismembered, while still conscious. Although 93 percent of consumers condemn such abuses, no law prevents them.
On Oct. 2 (Gandhi’s birthday), 400 communities in all 50 states and two dozen other countries observe World Farm Animals Day with public education events (see www.WFAD.org.) The purpose is to expose and memorialize the cruel treatment of animals raised for food and to promote an animal-free diet.
It’s a great opportunity for each of us to embrace a cruelty-free, healthful, cost-saving, plant-based diet.
The escalating costs of corn and soybeans and the current credit crunch are forcing... more
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