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You may never look at food again after watching “Food, Inc.,” an Oscar-nominated documentary on the largely unregulated food industry.
Directed by Robert Kenner, the film shows how the manufacturing of food has changed since the 1960s.
Decades ago, numerous family farms put our food on the table.
Today, a handful of factory farms use technology, cruelty and cheap alternatives to produce our food.
Kenner explains it all started with that most evil of fast-food restaurants, McDonald’s. McDonald’s really created the fast-food industry in the 1960s by taking away the carhops on roller skates and reducing the menu at the time to hamburgers, fries, Cokes and milk shakes.
McDonald’s wanted its food supply to be cheap and with the rise of the fast-food industry, food manufacturers took note. The result is even if you don’t eat fast food, the food you buy in supermarkets is a result.
The director pans the rows and rows of food at the supermarket, revealing that much of our food comes from the same source: corn.
Corn is cheap and easy to produce.
It goes into everything from soda pop to meat to catsup and practically everything else.
The film chronicles how chickens are kept in dark quarters, bred to create the popular white breast meat, pumped with antibiotics. The birds go from chicks to eating birds in half the time as they once did, but they cannot walk, live in excrement and many die early.
Cows, we learn, are fed cheap corn rather than their natural diet of grass. The upshot is they become susceptible to e-coli bacteria, something that doesn’t happen with grass-fed animals.
What’s worse is in some states it is illegal to criticize the food industry. Who cares about the First Amendment!
A mother who tells how her son contracted e-coli from a Jack-in-the-Box restaurant and died must also contend with legal action from the meat industry for her criticism.
Farmers are also forced to buy genetically altered seeds from Monsanto.
The director shows us how especially during the George W. Bush administration, high officials of the food industry got jobs as government regulators.
A bill requiring people to be informed if their food was genetically altered passed both houses of the California legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The food industry wouldn’t comment for the film and wouldn’t let its farmers allow the filmmakers to record in their chicken barns.
The filmmakers also give suggestions on what the average person can do, including planting your own garden.
If you go to grocery shores and if you eat food you don’t grow, you should watch “Food, Inc.”
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On a totally different note, if you like videos and dogs — and who doesn’t — boy do I have something for you. It’s the professionally produced Boo-Wow Walk video. It chronicles the annual event, held in October at Maple Ridge Golf Course in Saybrook Township.
This is the biggest fundraiser of the year for the Animal Protective League, which houses, cares for and adopts out the county’s homeless animals.
Margie Beth Trax Page, director of the event, describes all that goes into putting on the event, from getting prizes and sponsors to getting straw, setting up, getting and cooking the food and tearing it all down when it’s all over. Page also happens to be Star Beacon Geneva reporter.
The video, less than a half hour in length, includes interviews with participants (the two-legged ones), lots of footage of the walk, and still photos as well (some taken by yours truly.) It was all put together by Adam Racinskas.
If you were there, there’s a good chance you will be spotted somewhere in the video.
You can get a copy, which includes a rare look at Trax’s tattoo (see it when she’s carrying boxes to a van), Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in front of the APL store in front of Sears. There will be baked goods and other cool stuff. The videos are a mere $18.
I will even be there. But please don’t let that stop you from attending.
