Food, Inc.

I bit the bullet.  I girded my stomach and finally watched a movie that I'd been dreading.  I worried that it would be guaranteed to put me off meat products from now until I form my utopian society.

What?  You don't plan a utopian society where you're the benevolent dictator on your morning commute?  Weird.

The film was at once better and worse than I thought.

A few months ago, Chad and I watched the HBO film Temple Grandin.  Temple is an autistic woman who, through an insane amount of work on the parts of her mother, her teachers and herself, became one of the leading experts on animal behavior, working with livestock and advocating humane treatment of animals - especially those being used for food.  I loved her philosophy:

"I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect."   —Temple Grandin

When companies start to look at living, breathing animals as "product", it's not a leap for them to start to look at the consumers as profit and the employees as "overhead".  Unethical treatment of the product and overhead results in unethical pursuit of the profit.

Here's a little gem from the film...

Feeding cattle corn.  I thought "corn fed beef" was a good thing.  Turns out it's not.  Cows can't process corn.  They're designed to be grazers, eating a diet of grasses.  But here's the tricky thing.  It takes four or five years to grow a calf into a 1200 pound cow.  But, if you feed it corn and supplement with growth hormones, antibodies and protein, you can slaughter that calf in 14 to 16 months.

If you're a businessman, which way would you go?  Never mind that changing their diet creates a perfect breeding ground for E. coli.  That can always be taken out by adding ammonia to ground beef filler.

Are you ill yet?

The longer we watched, the worse it got...

Monsanto suing a farmer because his corn was cross polinated by a patented, genetically modified corn pollen that blew to his property in the wind.

Really?  Really.

It was almost as bad as discovering Dead Peasants insurance.

There are too many instances to list.  Just...watch the film.  Watch it, learn, get overwhelmed and then remember...

We're capitalists. 

We vote for companies with our dollars.  When we purchase something, we're saying, "Keep making this product."  We have the power.  Use it wisely.