Food, inc. (2008) Robbert Kenner

Food inc. is a documentary of Robert Kenner. This documentary is about our food, and what we know about it.

Since 1950’s there was a big change in the food business. The brothers McDonald came up with a brilliant idea, fast food. They trained each employee to fulfil just one task, over and over again. In this way, they could pay them a low wage. The kitchen became basically a factory. The food was inexpensive and tasted good, that’s what made McDonald’s a great success. McDonalds became the largest purchaser of ground beef in the United States. They wanted their hamburgers to tastes, everywhere, exactly the same. They changed how ground beef is produced. 

Because of this, there is now only a hand full of companies controlling our food system.  All the meat is being produced by this system.
Why raise a small chicken in 70 days, if you can raise a twice as big chicken in half the time? The industry changed the entire way that chickens are raised. We redesigned the meat to fit the customer’s needs. They not only changed the chickens, they changed the famer. Farmers have no longer the control. The control is in hands of the food companies. It isn’t farming anymore but it’s mass production. 

We are now engineering our foods.  Food that doesn’t stale in the refrigerator, and don’t develop rancidity. Corn plays a big role in our industrial food.  You can find it in ketchup, cheese, batteries, peanut butter, coke, juice, diapers and many other products. We even feed the animals corn, because it’s cheap and it makes them fat quickly.  

There has always been food poisoning. As more and more technology is being applied to the production of food, you would think it would be getting saver. But unfortunately it isn’t. In this movie, a mom is telling the story of her son, who died within 12 days because of eating a hamburger. She is now fighting for food safety. 

Nowadays, it’s cheaper to buy a hamburger with fries, than to make a healthy meal. Especially the people with a lower income prefer fast food over healthy homemade food. There are a lot of people with obesity and/or diabetes.
Organic food is one of the fastest-growing segments in the food industry.  But even the organic food is often in hands of big brands like Pepsi or Kellogg’s.

A month doesn’t go by where there isn’t a story in the news that peels back the curtain on how that industrial food is made. Every time one of these stories comes out, we learn a little bit more about where our food is coming from.

- Laura van Rossum