Food inc Essay

Food, Inc is a film that lets people in on the food production in American. The film opens up in a grocery store, which has pictures of farmers giving you the idea that the food you are going to purchase is farm raised. However the film calls it a pastoral fantasy. Even though people would like to believe that their food is coming from a farm where that animal is raised the correct way that is not always the case. This film dug into certain aspects of food giving you the ins and outs on how all types of food is produced. This film is not trying to make someone turn in to a vegetarian. It is simply trying to inform people how food production has changed over the years. Something said in the film was that â€Å"it’s not farming anymore, it’s just mass production. Chickens today are genetically modified to have larger breasts since the consumer preference is white meat. A lot of these companies are injecting hormones in these animals to speed up the growth process. Where before a chicken life span was around 80 days, with this hormone being injected it knocks about 20 days off now. The faster the chicken grows, the more chicken can be produce at a faster rate. The chickens grow at such a fast rate that their bones and organs can’t keep up with the rapid growth of the muscles, or the meat. Mention in the film is that McDonalds is one of the largest purchasers of ground beef, potatoes, pork, lettuce and tomatoes. Fast food nearly started with McDonald’s. When they decided to make things easier their menu and hire employees that repeated one task over and over for minimum wage, the result was the fast food occurrence that cleaned the United States. Mention in the film â€Å"Eating meat produced by the system†. As long as people continue to eat meat that is not properly raised or properly killed we will continue to have the problem of how food is produced. The industry does not want you to know what you are eating. So they will sell you this dream that everything is farm raised, when in reality their feeding cows corn that produces infections, giving chickens hormone injections to speed up growth process. There’s nothing farm raised about these tactics. Joe Salatin says â€Å"Meet the need without comprising integrity†. There are ways food can be produced without all of the extra stuff. Salatin does his farming and killing outside. People have tried to get him shut down saying the way he produced chicken was not sanitary, but yet other companied that do produce meat has had infected meat even with them being in a factory. People drove over 100 miles just to purchase Salatin’s chicken. This says a lot; people do want quality produced food. The average farmer used to feed 6 to 8 people, now it is up to 126 people. If we had more farmers who practice Salatin’s techniques then we would be able to produce more. If there was not so much meat being produced then maybe people would not buy so much in abundance and meat would not have to be produce so fast and in large quantizes. People buy a lot because it is overly produce in my opinion. If food was not so readily available then maybe it would not be over consumed. As long as food is purchased in abundance companies will continue to produce food the way they do to keep up with how much food people are purchasing.