Casting your food vote.

Like agriculture itself, my job has a high season when work days stretch and my mind revolves nearly 100 per cent around Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show.  In case you haven’t noticed by my lack of posting – peak season has begun.  Nonetheless I have finally found some time to blog about Food Inc.

A good friend of mine (who was raised on a farm like me and has an interest in agricultural communications) jumped at the chance to see this movie with me.  Before going we discussed how important we both felt it was for us to watch the film with as little judgement as possible and hoped it would be a balanced representation of modern food production.

Here is a clip of the official trailer to give you an idea of how Food Inc.  presented its perspective on agriculture and food production.

Based largely on American agriculture, Food Inc. mostly explored poultry, swine, corn and beef production in addition to processing.  My friend is a poultry farmer whose family also operates a slaughterhouse so it was very interesting to hear how she felt the film explained and/or misled the audience about the ethics of meat processing in the USA or Canada. The film also features how large food manufacturers, brands and retailers are involved in the selling or marketing of food.

Food Inc. stretches from production to processing and purchasing hightlighting the complexities of the agricultural value chain.   For example, it showed the corporate side to mass produced organic foods.  At one point, representatives of Walmart visit an organic farm which produces milk for the new organic yogurt sold in their stores.   The farmer shakes all of their hands and she says, “It’s so funny that you’re here because we’ve  boycotted shopping at Walmart for years.”

Although I won’t give my full opinions on everything I saw in Food Inc. — this is the Internet after all — I will say that I thought one of the closing thoughts from the film struck a cord with me.

“When we run an item past the superstore scanner we’re voting…”

If nothing else, I took away from Food Inc. that each food purchase matters because it’s a vote for the food production system we support. Whether you chose seasonal, ready made, organic, local, low fat, high quality, convenient or cheap food it is a vote for the food production or agricultural industry you believe in.

Food Inc. brings up so many discussion topics and things to think about (good and bad) whether its food production, processing, safety, history o r consumption trends.  By no means did my friend and I agree with everything that was shown or said in the film but we did enjoy how it kept us discussing modern agriculture for hours afterwards.

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