Food, INC. Film and reading pg 1-64

Personally I felt the film was extremely educative about the true problems that we currently have as far as mass food production. It is nice and reassuring that people such as Karl Weber and Eric Schlosser are being proactive and going against large and power figures to lead the movement to a healthier and more economic form of food production. As far as the movie goes, The part that I was most stricken by was the mass chicken farms. Throughout the interviews, video, pictures and the saddened music during some transitional aspects of the section I felt a growing concern for how our food is being produced. The fact that a few major companies are in total control of basically all of our food farms is disheartening, especially how they don't care about the farmers, the environment or to an extent the chickens themselves. All they care about is getting the most chickens to the butcher in the shortest amount of time and spending as little money while doing so. When the company is making hundreds of thousands of dollars off a single chicken barn while the farmer only receives, I believe it was $18,000 a year is horrible. Then, another aspect the section is how there were dead chickens piled up laying on the ground around the live chickens. There were so many chickens in the small area it was hard to see the ground at times. Then, the last thing that bothered me about this part of the movie was when they were loading the chickens to take to the processing plant. How they were just throwing the chickens into bins didn't bother me as much as how they said that the bulk of the workers gathering them were foreign illegal aliens being used as cheap labor. Which is bad among itself, but worse by the fact that they are taking jobs from Americans, even though it may be a bad, crap job it is a job all the same which is better than no job at all.

As far as the reading goes, I felt it did a good job portraying the bad parts of the large scale food producing (the big powerful companies side) and the unhealthy aspects of it as well. But mostly what stuck out to me was how the the book stayed positive with a large section talking about how Gary Hirshberg chair, president and "CE-YO" of Stonyfield started a small scale organic yogurt company, which grew to be a worldwide company. Then, while doing this large transition they became more eco-friendly and even more organic. The major point of this section pf reading that stuck out to me was the following quote talking about eco-solutions: " The fact that eco solutions (to me, that prefix signifies both ecological and economic) like organics, waste reduction and GHG reductions present the biggest business opportunities in the history of mankind." (p. 59) This stood out to me because it shows that he is not only worried about just making money like the big companies. He is concerned about being more eco-friendly, and making money while doing it. But, not only making just money, making a healthier environment and source of healthier food for the mass population. This supplemented the point that the movie was trying to get along well I believe by not just saying here is the bad and we need to change it. I says that there is a way to get the same end result, and here is a healthier and more efficient way of achieving that goal, it showed a positive amongst all the negatives. I felt the majority of the first section of the reading did a good job of this thought. Then, another section that stuck out to me was the chapter on the Dirty Six, about the worst animal practices in agribusiness. Some of the apects I had already known about such as the long distance transport for example. But there were some that I had not thought about such as the force feeding of Foi Gras to food birds which caused them to expand and making movements very difficult while inhibiting their liver functions. This is horrible to me, especially from the ethical side. This section opened my eyes to parts of agribusiness that is often shaded from the everyday public.