Food Inc

Right, I’m not going to spend much time on this one as this doesn’t really fall into any kind of entertainment in my opinion. This is educational stuff and no number of pretty graphs and brightly coloured fonts (fading in and out notwithstanding) is going to make up for a well written story and some handy acting talent. Still, this is up for an Oscar for Best Documentary, so deserves at least a mention. And as I have watched it today, you may as well get an opinion on it, even if your stance on the subject will place you firmly on my side of the fence or one of the other two sides available to you.

And here I must make a confession. I treat corporate greed much like I do religion, so Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher should take note, as my opinion is not unique. And that opinion is quite simply this; If it doesn’t affect me unduly, then I’m not too worried about it, if I’m honest.

Now Eric Schlosser would probably be shaking his head about now if he was reading this, but telling me that corn can be found in batteries, that they feed it to cows and they are breeding fatter chickens even quicker with breasts so big they can’t even walk more than two steps at a time really doesn’t move me. If I could find a woman that displayed these same properties, I know many men that would call that progress. However as it is a poor, helpless double D-cupped chicken that has been bred for this purpose and nothing else, I find it hard to get uppity about it.

Big businesses get big because they are good at what they do and ‘Food Inc’ comes across as a bitter dummy-spit of a documentary from farmers that were frankly too damned stupid to see common business sense when it tried to sell them the thought of unbridled wealth and prosperity. To compound that idiocy, those same farmers continued to invest in a lose-lose scenario rather than accept they were screwed in the first place and then decided to bend over yet again to let those same corporations have another stab at making first class chumps of them, which of course they did.

I appreciate that the loss of a child due to e-coli is not a laughing matter and you cannot help but feel for a mother who loses her son in a mere week and a half allegedly to the burgers he had been eating, but you do have to equally ask that if this was his diet, it is a risk that she takes when feeding her child. This sounds cold-hearted, but this is the same risk every parent takes when feeding their child as none of us are witness to the process by which our meat is packaged and where it comes from. Highlighting the process here only goes to prove that human beings are fallible and if there is an error, it will, more often than not, being human. If that is also true, then that error will happen again and no matter how much legislation is written or laws passed to prevent such tragedies happening in the future, they will still happen.

Whilst I of course feel sorry for the parents of the children that died, it would be naive to believe that this is the most important issue facing us today and I can think of at least a dozen things more urgent that the producers could have chosen to take a stand about. Things that cost more lives that are equally unfair, equally driven by greed and equally preventable.

Of course, major corporations are greedy, careless and chastised for not caring about the problems they cause. These are big targets for everyone to have a pop at, and usually not without foundation. I do admire the project and it’s stance, but I have to wonder exactly what they hoped to achieve by bringing the problems of mass produced meat to a mass audience.

Like myself, who is in the small minority of people honest enough to admit as much, most will simply shrug their shoulders, admit that it’s awful and then do nothing about it, precisely for the reason the corporations became huge in the first place. These companies service millions, even billions of people, have a largely unblemished health and safety history in comparison to their customer base, provide convenience for the end user and offer it at a reduced price. They tick all of the boxes that modern living requires. If the only people that complain about it are the parents of a dozen children and some farmers who were too stupid to see when they were being taken for a ride, then it is hardly worthy of ninety minutes of film.

Sad, but true.