Film Analysis: Food Inc.

1. The film Food Inc. shines a light on the problems we face when purchasing food within the United States. Our food is largely a rearrangement of the same basic crops. The number one crop within the United States of course being corn. Corn has long been grown in the North American region due to its low maintenance growing and its ability to grow in both warm and cooler climates. Corn is such a staple food within the United States; it is involved in nearly nighty percent of all products found in supermarkets. This makes it an extremely in demand crop, yet it is one of the cheapest crops to purchase on the market. How is this conundrum possible? It is simple, the Government saw the potential in corn and saw the endless products it could be …show more content…
One of the current most troubling United States epidemics is that of childhood obesity and obesity in general. It has increased dramatically in these past few years and sadly only continues to escalate. There are many factors that can play into this epidemic, such as eating habits and physical energy. While these factors are major keys in obesity, in many cases it can be tied back to our food as a whole. The food within the United States is all based around the commercial aspect of it. That is, not the consumer, but what the company wants the consumer to eat. That being said its easy to undertand how nearly all of our food would be made to the same standard. These foods nearly always contain corn or a variation of it, and are high in sugars and calories. Similar styles of food are created as a sort of feed for animals as it is a naturally high fat diet, which generally helps put on weight. These same methods are now being used within the United States but on a commercial scale in which the food is designed for human consumption. Bands of people are coming together to protest this style of food production and there has been an upstarting moment to eat more locally and fresh. This social movement is sometimes hard to keep up with largely due to the increase in price over foods labeled organic or natural. Products containing this cheap, in demand corn, are significantly cheaper than foods that are entirely healthier, as long as lettuce is more expensive than pop and chips, …show more content…
Our industrialization of many markets has made the United States the economic superpower that it is. Similar to the steel industry during the industrial revolution, we took the food industry and put a complete industrial element to it in order to lower the cost to produce, and the speed in which we could produce it. While this all sounds great and like a good thing for our economy, it is becoming more dissociated from the quality and how natural the food is, and focusing on the quantity in which they can produce. This practice is referred to as depersonalization. It is typically used to describe the treatment of patients in the medical field as if they were objects, but in this case it is used to describe the food industry treatment of the meat we eat. It is in many cases unsafe largely due to a problem in which we created in our now industrialized food business. We feed cows a cheaper corn diet in order to produce more weight, and its cheaper than traditional grass feeding. This creates a large problem due to the fact cows digestive systems are not naturally able to break down many of the parts of corn, and therefore this bile sits within their stomachs to fester into a bacteria known as Ecoli. Ecoli is extremely dangerous especially in the food industry in which their products are being