Food Inc.
So, I watched the movie Food Inc. last night/this morning. Truly an enlightening and terrifying documentary, and an important one to watch. I highly encourage everyone to see it. That being said, I found a few holes in it.
-The concept of tainted vegetables was never really explained. Most of the recent nationwide recalls for vegetables have had to do with salmonella poisoning. The brief segment on these recalls was placed directly next to the segment on E. coli in beef. The E. coli in beef thing made perfect sense to me and was something I fully understood before watching the film. However, I still don't understand the salmonella contamination. The two segments were lumped together to imply that they were somehow related, but I saw no explicit attempt to logically link A to B.
-The film had a large segment on organic foods and tried to promote it as the one sign of hope in the food industry, that a consumer demand for organic foods has led large corporations to begin stocking organic foods. What the film failed to do was to explain exactly what the word "organic" means when referring to the USDA regulation and how this is superior to regular farming. If these large corporations are branching out into organics, as the film explained, and the film is, at the same time, condemning corporations for their dangerous food production techniques, how are we, as consumers, supposed to trust organic foods that come from these corporations?
Other than that, I think the film will change my eating habits somewhat. I'll look for organic alternatives when possible, and if I can find a local farmers market every now and then to buy meat from, I think I'll do that. However, when these things aren't convenient for me, I really don't have either the time or the resources to go and seek them out.
-The concept of tainted vegetables was never really explained. Most of the recent nationwide recalls for vegetables have had to do with salmonella poisoning. The brief segment on these recalls was placed directly next to the segment on E. coli in beef. The E. coli in beef thing made perfect sense to me and was something I fully understood before watching the film. However, I still don't understand the salmonella contamination. The two segments were lumped together to imply that they were somehow related, but I saw no explicit attempt to logically link A to B.
-The film had a large segment on organic foods and tried to promote it as the one sign of hope in the food industry, that a consumer demand for organic foods has led large corporations to begin stocking organic foods. What the film failed to do was to explain exactly what the word "organic" means when referring to the USDA regulation and how this is superior to regular farming. If these large corporations are branching out into organics, as the film explained, and the film is, at the same time, condemning corporations for their dangerous food production techniques, how are we, as consumers, supposed to trust organic foods that come from these corporations?
Other than that, I think the film will change my eating habits somewhat. I'll look for organic alternatives when possible, and if I can find a local farmers market every now and then to buy meat from, I think I'll do that. However, when these things aren't convenient for me, I really don't have either the time or the resources to go and seek them out.