What You Eat: Food, Inc. documentary review

I have always been fascinated with how much sugar, meat, and carbs a person can consume in their whole lifetime. Being a fast food aficionados (c’mon, who isn’t?), I know that I am not leading a healthy lifestyle. No denying that.

On average, I have one fast food meal per week, just because I love my burger and fries; I eat chocolate and ice cream and candies and cookies, though not excessively; I love my supposedly healthy yoghurt drinks, which essentially are just sugar laden drinks with artificial flavorings.

I have cancer genes running in my family, which when I come to think of it, are not really genetic.  My granddad passed away when I was younger due to chronic stage 3 lung cancer, and my mom succumbed to stage 3 breast cancer when she was merely 48 years old. Both of them had a penchant for fattening food, while my granddad was also a heavy smoker. 3 of my family members/relatives are obese, and some are getting there (being obese) soon if they are not watchful of what they eat. Although no one in their right minds liked to be termed as “obese”, we have only ourselves to blame. A daily diet of fried chicken, santan and masak lemak; not to mention sugary sweet kuih muih and teh tariks, it is only a matter of time before the ticking time bomb blows off.

The reason why I am telling you all these, is not to air my dirty laundry in public or anything, but to serve as a reminder to all of us that, we are all a product of what we eat or consume.

Yesterday, not knowing what to do on a lazy Sunday evening, I decided to watch a documentary (instead of Gossip Girl’s reruns), that really put things into perspectives. Food, Inc., a no holds barred film directed by Robert Kenner, and was nominated for the Academy Award back in 2009 (this was a 2008 documentary), examines the truth behind corporate farming, GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms) and how this encourages proliferation of unhealthy and unsustainable eating patterns that put us consumers, at the losing end, and wealthy corporates like Smithfield, Cargill, Tyson (just to name a few) at the other.

You know how at the supermarket, sometimes your conscience is clear (so you think) and you are always attracted to packaging with images of farmers in their farms, happy and healthy looking cows and poultry, labeled “Farm this”, “Farm that”, “Nature this” and “Nature that”, claiming that the butter, chicken cutlets, bacon strips are all sourced ethically from the backyard of Farmer John? Truth is, in most cases, they are just products of different packaging from the same few big multinational corporates that also sells unhealthy beef burgers and frozen fried chicken. According to the documentary, the chicken and beef or even vegetables that we consume today, is just an idea, or perspective. We think we are eating healthy by skipping fast food and eating more red meat and fresh poultries, when in fact the animals are induced to look like how they look, on your plate, meat fresh and tender and completely harmless. Once a while you read about all the horrible E-Coli and salmonella outbreaks from contaminated fish, burgers, beef, poultry and even vegetables, which turns a completely healthy human being into a dead one, in a matter of days; and you wondered what went wrong.

Everything.

Long gone were the days that you actually know the man who grows your food (I don’t know any farmers, do you?), because almost everything that we put in our mouth is essentially mass produced in a manufacturing plant or factory by big corporates.

So, how do these big corporates earn money?

In simple economics, big corps made their dollars when there are economies of scale, their cost cut to a fraction of its originals, and production increase by hundreds timesfold. So, let’s say if traditionally you can rear 100 chickens on 1 farm, and you feed them nutritious grains and they grow to adult size in 3 months; and you sell your chicken for 10 dollars each. Perhaps you would make net earnings of 2 dollars, because grains are expensive, and so are farm rentals. Big companies are essentially a group of smart people who despite knowing the importance of sustainable and ethical sourcing, wouldn’t put their two cents on it; I mean, why would they sacrifice their dollars so you enjoy good food? It doesn’t make any monetary sense, to them at least.

Here’s the ugly truth. They will cramp 2000 chickens in 1 farm, feed the chickens antibiotics and put growth hormones in their food so they grow bigger and faster. All these chickens will be kept in dark humid dens, deep in their own excrement, providing hotspots for bacteria and disease infestation. By the end of 1 month (instead of 3), these chickens are fat and ready to be slaughtered, and served on your plate.  In fact, these chickens are so fat that they can’t take a few steps without plonking back on their weights; why of course, they are almost twice the size of traditionally reared farm chickens. With qualities and standards compromised, we don’t need to put two and two together to figure out why diseases outbreak from food contamination is such a norm now.

Are there any laws to prevent these from happening?

You see, that is the main issue. People behind these big corps are so deep pocketed that they can so easily buy their way into congress, donating large sums of monies into election campaigns and establishing networks so intricate that you wouldn’t be able to call foul or sue when you are being wronged. Simply put, they change the laws governing the food industry and hide behind attorneys who are willing to fight for them so that food labels hide hard facts (like calorific contents, trans fat contents etc), workers can be mistreated and paid low wages, quality controls can be conducted fewer and fewer times by corrupted authorities; at the expense of consumers’ well beings.

One segment that really leaves a huge dent on me is when the documentary interviews a family of four (husband and wife, 2 young daughters); who lives on the husband’s small wage as a driver. In the interview, the family lamented that they were not able to afford quality food and has to resort to eating fast food almost every day. They ate dollar menu burgers at fast food joints almost every day, because in their own words, “a broccoli is more expensive than a burger”. With the husband’s deteriorating health and kids looking pale because of malnutrition, it was just so sad to know how malicious the food industry can get; and yet we are still ignorant.

What I touched here is just the tip of the iceberg, because really, you have to watch the documentary to actually understand the way the world’s food industry is working. When you do, you will see ‘food’ not only as the thing you put in your mouth to stay alive, but rather the key pieces that holds everything together: humanity, morality and conscience; and without all these, we are nothing but slaves to our own undoings.

I looked at my bag of chips, and tell myself, I should definitely change my lifestyle for the better. It will be hard and I will miss my burgers and fries, but I want to make that change, bit by bit. I think , at the end of the day, consumers are really the ones who dictate how the big corps act; if we demand healthy organic and ethically sourced food at whatever the price, the corps will be skewed toward that direction.

Although the documentary is riveting and eye opening, what it failed to address is the aspects of costs and sustainability. True enough, we don’t want the food that we eat to be compromised, but at what costs and can everyone afford to pay that costs? When resources like land, cheap labor, commodities are limited, men make do with what they have and maximizes it; that’s how I see the way the big corps are operating. To make food or anything for that matter cheap, there’s only one way to do it, which is to scale back on quality.