Food Inc.

I was excited when I found out we were watching Food Inc. in class.  I had watched it once before and it’s really an eye opening experience. Despite the fact that you may never want to eat at McDonalds again after watching the documentary, I think it should be shown to every individual to educate them on the food industry and where the food they eat is actually coming from.  Most individuals blindly eat their food with little regard to where it came from our how it was made. They are unaware that most of the chicken they eat at any fast food restaurant or even buy at Wal-Mart is just a mass produced genetically modified organism. 

The hardest part for me was to see the horrible conditions that these animals live in just to be killed for our eating pleasure.  It’s not the killing of the animals that gets me; it’s the inhumane conditions and treatment many corporations consider fit for the animals.  Grant it I grew up on a farm so slaughtering animals is nothing new to me. However we never treated any of our livestock in the ways depicted in the documentary. Often time’s organizations pump chickens, cows, and pigs with hormones, antibiotics and other unnatural chemicals just to increase the size and weight of the animal. In many cases the animals are unable to walk because their body weight grows so fast their muscle and skeletal system can no longer support them, causing the animal to lay on the floor the majority of its life.

The true story from Food Inc. when the mother talked about her two and a half year old son dying from E-coli infected beef from Jack in the Box was the most disheartening aspect of the documentary. She mentioned that her son was so thirsty in the hospital but the doctors wouldn’t allow him to drink water, they would just give him sponges that were dipped in water.  He was so thirsty that he bit the head off of the sponge.  What that child and his whole family went through is something that no family should ever have to go through.  I will never understand why we allow large corporations to continue to exhibit total disregard and unsafe practices just to increase revenue. This corporation was aware of the E-coli outbreak but neglected to take the necessary measures to recall the contaminated meet. Furthermore if we know that this strain of E-coli can be eliminated by allowing cows to eat grass and hay instead of the corn that they are being fed, why do we still continue to feed the cows corn?