If you eat food, you should watch this movie

June 6, 2010

I just finished watching Food, Inc. — a sobering, yet hopeful, documentary about the modern industrial food machine. It’s an incredible film and I don’t think anyone should take another bite before they watch it. It makes me appreciate that a lot of my food happens to come from small “farmers/wet” markets.

Cheers to Ben for loaning it to me. Eye opening and mouth closing. If you live in a country that doesn’t have Blockbuster or Netflicks, I’ve heard it’s also available via torrent download.

7 Responses

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention If you eat food, you should watch this movie | A China Blog on Suzhou Expat Life -- Topsy.com

  2. I saw Food Inc a few months ago and it was pretty eye opening. Until watching that movie i had never heard of Monsanto which turned out to be kinda strange when you look at it. Here in the US, when you talk about the evil corporations, places like Wal Mart and Microsoft come to mind as huge uncaring companies that just want to take over everything… And then here is Monsanto that seems if nothing else worse because they control the commodity that we REQUIRE to even make the food (seed).
    If you want to see another great documentary look on torrents for “The World According to Monsanto”. The whole show is about them and their near stranglehold on the seed/pesticide market all over the world.

    Reply

    • Hey David, just started watching “The World According to Monsanto” last night (thank you kickasstorrents.com) and I think I need to rescind my comment in the post about being grateful for living in China and my access to wet/farmers markets. It looks like Monsanto’s GM products are well dispersed into China’s food source. Definitely a great watch and highly recommended for anyone else who comes across this post.

      Reply

      • It seems that we bump heads on absolutely everything Ryan. My dad is a senior quantitative geneticist for no other company than Monsanto and I think think the work they do there is important. The world’s population is growing and the amount of arable land is diminishing. In order to avoid a population crash and mass famine it is important that food production keep pace. I’m not saying that more food is the ultimate solution but it does buy us more time to get our population and consumption under control.

        Besides, think about the impact that agricultural development has had in our history. Civilization itself was built on farming. A steady source of abundant food supply grown by part of village is the only reason people were able to specialize into jobs like village priest, miners, traders, craftsman etc. We see this pattern all over the world in pre-history in China, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica. All at around ~ 10000bc people discover and selectively breed domesticated crops THEN civilization and culture and writing follows.

        And I take real offense at people who lecture others on holistics and the need for world wide organic farming. It is a privileged that would not be sustainable or affordable for 90% of the world. It may be fine and good to preach when you aren’t starving or malnourished.

        Penn and Teller will set you straight…
        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvNopv9Pa8

        btw, I don’t endorse Monsanto’s cooperate practice only the science they do. They use their legal teams aggressively and rather unscrupulously and their market share on the global seed trade borders on a monopoly (though it has fallen since the production of that film)

        Reply

      • Hey Justin, I don’t think we’re bumping heads on this one at all. I saw the Bullshit episode, and largely agree with what P&T said. But here’s the rub, I also agree with what the Food, Inc. folks are saying about Monsanto (as well as the follow up documentary by the French woman).

        You’re just putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable for sake of disagreeing. The problem that you sort of glossed over in your argument is the problem. I have no issue at all with using technology to improve society — in fact, I’m a huge proponent of it. Everything you said about the history of agriculture is fine, and I’m not sure how you got it in your head that by criticizing the modern multi-national take-over of the food supply equates to some granola crunching, tree hugging view of backwards agriculture.

        A holistic approach is not necessarily an organic one, so I’m not seeing the correlation there — or am I falling into semantics? The problem is the multi-nationals with no other motivator (or system of ethics) than profit that now control the food supply. Let me be clear, I don’t see large multi-national organic foods producers as any different. And while it’s also easy to find many examples of a small group of men holding the control and power over the food supply for the poorer masses in history as well, it’s not something we should as society be working towards with promotion and encouragement.

        So, to summarize — yes, lets make better foods, better ways of growing foods, and better yields. Lets use that technology to feed the world. Lets not allow the brochures and mission statements of multi-national corporations that care nothing about any of those goals bully us into thinking that they have any of that on their agenda. Monsanto doesn’t care about feeding poor people, and they never will, their business isn’t to feed poor people, it’s to increase profits — and those two things rarely, if ever, go together. But if we allow them to own the technology to aggressively take over the food supply through IP protections, but ever more scarily through aggressive gene dispersal (watch the bit in the French doc about Mexico) that doesn’t give anyone a choice about being a customer servant of the corporation, then we’ll all suffer.

        Side Note: While I love Penn (have you seen his new Penn Point show on Revision3?) and we share a lot of social libertarian views, we differ somewhat in our economic standpoints, in that he seems to be a lot more of a Friedmanite than I could ever be — for pretty much all the reasons I dipped into above.

        Reply

  3. http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTU3NzExNTY4.html

    Food Inc. hammers through on a conventional browser, no pauses or glitches.

    ‘The World According to Monsanto’

    http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTUxMDc3NjQw.html

    in French & English.

    Monsanto is at the top of my list of Jamiesons’ World most hated Corporations for so many reasons. Infertile seeds after the first crop indeed. ….And the Chinese run with ties flapping to herbicide free fields that demand next crop seeds from – Monsanto or its affiliates.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*