In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

 

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, a good interview with Mother Jones) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

 

On June 12, 2009 an important and empowering documentary film will open, Food, Inc. – find theatre listings here.

 

Genetically Engineered Food

 

The genetic engineering of plants and animals is looming as one of the greatest and most intractable environmental challenges of the 21st Century. Already, this novel technology has invaded our grocery stores and our kitchen pantries by fundamentally altering some of our most important staple food crops.

 

By being able to take the genetic material from one organism and insert it into the permanent genetic code of another, biotechnologists have engineered numerous novel creations, such as potatoes with bacteria genes, “super” pigs with human growth genes, fish with cattle growth genes, tomatoes with flounder genes, and thousands of other plants, animals and insects. At an alarming rate, these creations are now being patented and released into the environment. 

Currently, up to 45 percent of U.S. corn is genetically engineered as is 85 percent of soybeans. It has been estimated that 70-75 percent of processed foods on supermarket shelves–from soda to soup, crackers to condiments–contain genetically engineered ingredients.  

A number of studies over the past decade have revealed that genetically engineered foods can pose serious risks to humans, domesticated animals, wildlife and the environment. Human health effects can include higher risks of toxicity, allergenicity, antibiotic resistance, immune-suppression and cancer. As for environmental impacts, the use of genetic engineering in agriculture could lead to uncontrolled biological pollution, threatening numerous microbial, plant and animal species with extinction, and the potential contamination of non-genetically engineered life forms with novel and possibly hazardous genetic material.

 

Despite these long-term and wide-ranging risks, Congress has yet to pass a single law intended to manage them responsibly. This despite the fact that our regulatory agencies have failed to adequately address the human health or environmental impacts of genetic engineering. On the federal level, eight agencies attempt to regulate biotechnology using 12 different statutes or laws that were written long before genetically engineered food, animals and insects became a reality. The result has been a regulatory tangle, where any regulation even exists, as existing laws are grossly manipulated to manage threats they were never intended to regulate. Among many bizarre examples of these regulatory anomalies is the current attempt by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate genetically engineered fish as “new animal drugs.”

 

The haphazard and negligent agency regulation of biotechnology has had serious consequences for consumers and the environment. Unsuspecting consumers by the tens of millions are being allowed to purchase and consume unlabeled genetically engineered foods, despite a finding by FDA scientists that these foods could pose serious risks. And new genetically engineered crops are being approved by federal agencies despite admissions that they will contaminate native and conventional plants and pose other significant new environmental threats. In short, there has been a complete abdication of any responsible legislative or regulatory oversight of genetically engineered foods. Clearly, now is a critical time to challenge the government’s negligence in managing the human health and environmental threats from biotechnology.

 

CFS seeks to prevent the approval, commercialization or release of any new genetically engineered crops until they have been thoroughly tested and found safe for human health and the environment. CFS maintains that any foods that already contain genetically engineered ingredients must be clearly labeled.

 

Excerpts from Center for Food Safety

 

Cloned Animals: should we raise them and eat them?

 

With the advent of cloned livestock, yet another biotech science experiment may soon find its way to the American dinner table. In January 2008, the FDA essentially told the public that the meat and milk from cloned livestock are safe for human consumption. FDA’s action flies in the face of widespread scientific concern about the risks of food from clones, and ignores the animal cruelty and troubling ethical concerns that the cloning process brings. The approval also goes against the will of Congress, who voted twice in 2007 to delay FDA’s decision on cloned animals until additional safety and economic studies can be completed, and ignores the feelings of the American public, 150,000 of whom wrote to FDA opposing the approval during last year’s public comment period. What’s worse, FDA will not require labeling on cloned food, so consumers will have no way to avoid these experimental foods.

 

Animal cloning is a new technology with potentially severe risks for food safety. Defects in clones are common, and cloning scientists warn that even small imbalances in clones could lead to hidden food safety problems in clones’ milk or meat. There are few studies on the risks of food from clones, and no long-term food safety studies have been done. Numerous opinion polls show that the majority of Americans do not want food from animal clones and are opposed to cloning on moral or ethical grounds.

 

The FDA’s veterinary medicine advisory panel rebuked the agency in 2003 for its position, declaring that not enough research has been done to determine whether food derived from cloned animals is safe. In fact, livestock cloning raises numerous health and ethical concerns. Over 90 percent of cloning attempts fail, and cloned animals that are born have more health problems and higher mortality rates than sexually reproduced animals.

 

Given that researchers do not understand many of the health problems that arise throughout the lifecycles of cloned animals, the FDA acted irresponsibly in assuming that the foods produced from these animals are safe for humans to eat. According to Ian Wilmut, the leader of the team of scientists that cloned the sheep Dolly, determining the health impacts of food derived from clones must be based on the animals’ complete health profiles. Such studies have not been done.

 

The Center for Food Safety has called on FDA to ban the use of clones in food production until the food safety and animal cruelty problems in cloning have been resolved, and until public discussions have addressed the troubling ethical issues that cloning brings. We also call on FDA, in the event that these pre-conditions can be met, to require labeling of food from animal clones.

 

CLONING PRESS AND POLICY COMMENTS:

 

Read the report Not Ready for Prime Time: FDA’s Flawed Approach to Assessing the Safety of Food from Animal Clones  PDF

 

View press releases on actions around animal cloning and policy comments from CFS

 

DOWNLOADS AND RESOURCES

 

View or download the Factsheet on cloned meat and dairy

Download and print the Not Milk? poster (11 x 17) Hang it up at work, school or at your local co-op!

View the CFS legal petition to FDA to regulate food from cloned animals

 

10 Things You Can Do To Change Our Food System

 

1. Drink fewer sodas and other sweetened beverages.

Fact: If you replace one 20 oz. soda a day with a no calorie beverage (preferably water), you could lose 25 lbs. in a year.

 

2. Eat at home instead of dining out.

Fact: Children consume almost twice (1.8 times) as many calories when eating food made outside the home.

 

3. Support the passage of state and local laws to require chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus and menu boards.

Fact: Half of the large chain restaurants do not provide any nutrition information to their customers.

 

4. Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks.

Fact: Over the past two decades, rates of obesity have tripled in children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years.

 

5. Meatless Mondays… Go without meat one day a week.

Fact: An estimated 70% of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to farm animals!

 

6. Buy organic or sustainable foods with little or no pesticide use.

Fact: According to the EPA, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the U.S.

 

7. Protect family farms, visit your local farmer’s market.

Fact: Farmers markets enable farmers to keep 80 to 90 cents of each dollar spent by the consumer.

 

8. Make a point to know where your food comes from – READ LABELS.

Fact: The average meal travels 1,500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate.

 

9. Tell Congress that food safety is important to you.

Fact: Each year, contaminated food causes millions of illnesses and thousands of deaths in the United States. [safe food does NOT mean processing it to the point where all the nutrition is removed and the food 'enhanced,' nor does it mean homogenizing/pasturizing, or irradiation. Food should be handled properly on the farm and in the home, and be as close to home as possible.] 

 

10. Demand job protections for farm workers and food processors, ensuring fair wages and other protections.

Fact: Poverty among farmworkers is more than double that of all wage and salary employees.

 

Get the PDF download of these 10 Tips to Healthy Eating from Food, Inc. and share the 5×7 post card with others!

 

Film Review

 

Los Angeles Times – Patrick Goldstein 

 

The Big Picture goes on a hunger strike

 

10:47 AM PT, Sep 9 2008

 

FROM THE TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL:

 

“I have to admit that after coming out of a packed screening Monday afternoon of “Food Inc,.” I was suddenly convinced that all my vegetarian pals were a lot smarter than I’d ever imagined. Directed by Robert Kenner, this timely documentary offers a depressingly persuasive portrait of the evils of big American agribusiness and the often horrific journey that our food makes from corporate cornfields and cattle pens to the local supermarket. Illustrated with bracing interviews with “Fast Food Nation’s” Eric Schlosser and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma’s” Michael Pollan, two leading investigative food reporters and essayists, “Food Inc.” is more than just a documentary–it’s a riveting cautionary tale.

Even though the subject matter could’ve been tedious and earnest, Kenner manages to keep our attention by using lots of anecdotal detail and ravishing visuals–cinematographer Richard Pearce seems to have shot the entire film (except for some scary hidden-camera footage) at either sunrise or sunset, bathing everything in a subversively autumnal glow. Its central point is that if we knew where the vast majority of our food actually came from, we’d never dream of eating it. After seeing a typical Perdue chicken house, you’d never buy a basket of fried chicken again. If you saw the inside of the world’s largest hog slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, N.C. (where a lot of the hidden camera footage was shot by actual workers there), you’d never order any more bacon with your eggs. And if you saw America’s biggest cattle yards, where cows stand ankle deep in their own manure, you’d take a pass on that nice juicy steak they serve at your favorite restaurant.

The best thing about the documentary is that it does what good reporting does–it connects the dots. Ever since the McDonald brothers discovered you could make hamburgers in assembly-line fashion, farms have become factories as Corporate Agriculture geared its production toward total uniformity. Americans end up spending less money on food than ever, but we pay a huge cost–starting with the fact that one out of every three kids born after 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes–because it’s cheaper to buy a cheeseburger or a giant bottle of diet soda than a head of broccoli. That’s one key reason why income level is the biggest predictive indicator when it comes to obesity.

“Food Inc.” offers plenty of other revelations, starting with the relationship between the weakening of USDA oversight and the revolving door of Corporate Agriculture lobbyists and executives who ended up serving in key Bush administration posts. But what makes the film really hit home is that it talks about our food in such a personal way. You realize that consuming food is really a series of choices. Once you’ve seen the way cows are raised in Corporate Agriculture, jammed so tightly together that they can barely move, and how they’re raised on an indie farmer’s open field, grazing on grass instead of pellets of corn, you suddenly want to be a lot more vigilant about where your favorite burger joint’s beef comes from. This is one movie that truly provides food for thought.”  

 

Resources

Join the Lunchbox Brigade

 

Hungry for Change  (Child Nutrition Act Reauthorization) – Help ensure that the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act assures healthy food choices in schools by signing this petition. 

 

Factory Farming Campaign – working to reduce the suffering of animals raised for meat, eggs, and milk.

 

Support Labeling of Ingredients in Restaurant Food – Menu Labeling: you have the right to know. Center for science in the public interest.

 

Pesticide Action Network – Pesticide Action Network promotes the elimination of highly hazardous pesticides and offers solutions that protect people and the environment. 

 

Cool Foods Campaign – reducing global warming begins with the food we eat. Through education Cool Foods explains to the public how our food choices affect global warming and empowers people with resources to reduce their impact.