Review of Food, Inc. (2008) by Brooker B — 22 Nov 2010

Heart-Disease is the number one killer in the United States (not cancer as most people think). This can be caused by a number of things--genetic makeup, alcohol, smoking, attaching spark-plugs to your genitals one too many times, etc; however, the two main contributors are poor diet and lack of exercise.

Exercise should be taught from an early age, but there is hardly an anti-exercise industry out there trying to create a race of obese people. This documentary puts the Food Industry (I mean the fat-cats, of course) up there with the pre-lawsuit tobacco industry as far as a power-structure so connected that the FDA won't mess with it--there are even laws in certain states in which talking bad about meat is considered slander against the beef industry (something Oprah discovered when she did a show on the topic, was sued and only won because she could spend as much on lawyer fees as the industry**When will people realize that Oprah cannot be stopped by any person or piece of conventional weaponry**.

The Food Industry, unlike the tobacco industry or alcohol industry, is classist. It targets its leftover, salmonella, hormone injected meat at the one dollar menus that the children of the parents who both hold down two jobs, don't have time to cook and can't afford regular vegetables, not to mention organic ones.

It's simple to scold parents for feeding their kids crap until you look at the big picture. Also, the food industry has actually, through marketing, actually designed our taste-buds to crave salt and sugar above all other things.

Hippie Propaganda? Unfortunately, not. I love a juicy burger as much as the next guy and depend on canned and frozen veggies when the budget is tight. What this documentary convincingly argues is that organic or, at least, safer food is not necessarily more expensive to produce once the industry makes some alterations to the system.

Of course, they won't as long as we eat out of their hands and the government cowers from them. Time for some good old class-action! Tobacco is a dead-horse by now anyway. Oh..this is a well-made, frustrating but enlightening documentary that makes all these points much better than I have.