(Warning: you may not dare to eat food grown in a food factory after watching this doco)
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/j_ap_qefLjI?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Associate Professor Mark Lawrence, an expert in public health nutrition at Deakin University, has provided this review:
“Food Inc provides a devastating expose of the dysfunctional nature of the modern food system. It is a film that highlights the hypocrisy behind government attempts to encourage individuals to eat a healthy diet, while at the same time pursuing policies and partnerships with large food companies that create unhealthy food environments.
The film explains that in the space of a few generations the food system has been transformed from its ecological basis to a highly efficient commercial entity controlled from seed to supermarket by a small number of large multinational corporations. Revealing footage illustrates how the drive for increased efficiencies, ‘innovations’ and profit are positioned ahead of public health, social, animal welfare and environmental interests. For example, viewers are shown inside chicken farms that have become highly mechanised factories controlling drug and nutrition inputs that can produce a full weight chicken with enlarged breasts in 49 days that otherwise would take 3 months.
A particularly stark example of the exploitation of the power differential in the food system is illustrated through Monsanto’s pursuit of an elderly farmer. The farmer operated a creaky old seed cleaner machine to help a handful of his friends preserve their seed supply. From a public health perspective this might be seen as a public good because it is protecting seed biodiversity albeit with contamination from some of Monsanto’s genetically engineered seed. In the commercial world it was defined as a threat to ownership of a seed’s genetic material. The film shows Monsanto’s team of lawyers challenging this individual. After losing his savings attempting to defend himself, Monsanto then extracted the ultimate indignity, through tears he is shown being forced to reveal the names of his close friends to whom he had supplied cleaned seed.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/j_ap_qefLjI?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Associate Professor Mark Lawrence, an expert in public health nutrition at Deakin University, has provided this review:
“Food Inc provides a devastating expose of the dysfunctional nature of the modern food system. It is a film that highlights the hypocrisy behind government attempts to encourage individuals to eat a healthy diet, while at the same time pursuing policies and partnerships with large food companies that create unhealthy food environments.
The film explains that in the space of a few generations the food system has been transformed from its ecological basis to a highly efficient commercial entity controlled from seed to supermarket by a small number of large multinational corporations. Revealing footage illustrates how the drive for increased efficiencies, ‘innovations’ and profit are positioned ahead of public health, social, animal welfare and environmental interests. For example, viewers are shown inside chicken farms that have become highly mechanised factories controlling drug and nutrition inputs that can produce a full weight chicken with enlarged breasts in 49 days that otherwise would take 3 months.
A particularly stark example of the exploitation of the power differential in the food system is illustrated through Monsanto’s pursuit of an elderly farmer. The farmer operated a creaky old seed cleaner machine to help a handful of his friends preserve their seed supply. From a public health perspective this might be seen as a public good because it is protecting seed biodiversity albeit with contamination from some of Monsanto’s genetically engineered seed. In the commercial world it was defined as a threat to ownership of a seed’s genetic material. The film shows Monsanto’s team of lawyers challenging this individual. After losing his savings attempting to defend himself, Monsanto then extracted the ultimate indignity, through tears he is shown being forced to reveal the names of his close friends to whom he had supplied cleaned seed.