Food Inc.

The movie starts in a supermarket and they tell that the way we eat has changed over the last 50 years more than in the previous 10.000 years. A modern American supermarket has on average 47.000 products in store. There are also no seasons in the American supermarket anymore. At this moment there are tomatoes throughout the year, but they are grown on the other side of the world. These were picked when they were still green and ripened with gas. It looks like a tomato, but in fact it is not a real tomato. It is only the idea of a tomato. When we look at the reality most products do not come from a farm but from a factory. The reality is different than we think. The products we eat come from factories where most of the time the animals and workers are abused. There is a small group of multinationals that control the entire food chain at the moment. These companies hold a lot of information and this puts our health at risk. People eat food their entire lives without knowing where it comes from and the industry doesn’t want us to know the truth about what we are eating, because if we knew we might not want to eat it.

The industrial food system began with the fast food in the 1930’s. There was a new kind of restaurant with a drive-in. The McDonald brothers were the first who started this and decided to cut costs and simplify. They took most things on the menu away and made their restaurant a kind of factory. Each employee was given only one task so they can work fast and give them low wages. This food was cheap and tasted good. By producing as much as possible, the restaurant was a great success. Today McDonalds is America’s largest consumers of beef and potatoes and almost the largest consumers of pork, chicken, tomatoes, lettuce and apples.

Even if you do not eat at fast food restaurants, you still eat food from one of the large multinationals. Never in history there were such large and powerful food companies. For example, Tyson is one of the largest meat processing companies in history.

In a chicken farm in Kentucky we can see that chickens were changed. They are now twice as big as a few years ago and they got a big chest. The chickens reach that size twice as fast as a normally grown chicken. The chickens grow at such a rate that their bones and organs can’t keep up with the quick growth of the muscles, or the meat. When the makers of the documentary ask if they can get inside a chicken house, they get rejected multiple times. Eventually one lady agreed to get inside. Inside the chicken house we see thousands of chickens and some of them are dead. The chickens can hardly walk because of their weight, and the many antibiotics they get in their food are making them immune to the antibiotics. Other sectors are following now, because the method has proved successful.

If we look at the source of the food in