Still Hungry?

One documentary I just caught was Food, Inc. It's a detailed look at where food comes from in America, looking at cattle, pork, chickens, corn, soybeans, and how corporate America has taken over and controlled it all, brought in a processing like mentality and dictates pretty much how everyone eats, regardless of buying fast food or from the supermarket.

Now, what I was watching, I applied the first rule of documentaries: not everything you see is the truth. Parts of it are undoubtedly true, but I'm not taking anything I saw at face value.

That said, it's a pretty ugly view of the food industry... for the people involved. For the corporations, where money is everything, everything is working fine. It's not nice, but this is how capitalism works, and if people vote with their dollars, it will change. But only if people care enough.

I emphasized America above as it isn't exactly the same here in New Zealand. Now, I'm no food expert, and have only what I bothered to google to find out, but we don't have a heavily subsidized corn industry here. We don't corn-feed cattle (we grass feed!). We... well, we probably do use pesticides as much, and have an organic industry relatively as strong as over there. What else we do or don't have I'll let enthused commentators post on.

(On the organic front, I don't listen to their 'anti-pesticide', etc, diatribes. We've been cultivating so much food ourselves that the food in the organic farmers hand is just as modified from "natural" as genetically modified food, just that GM'ed food is more direct about it.)

Interesting documentary, although not quite as impactful here. And, afterward, I went out and had chicken for dinner.

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