Food Inc.

Friday evening I downloaded Food Inc. from Netflix because I realized I couldn't keep saying I didn't need to see it, but needed instead to have something to say about it to folks who ask.

My overall reaction? It's probably the best made movie of this sort I have seen,
but I am tired of focusing on the negative.

One note I wrote myself:
Is the foodie critique a luxury? not just foodie choices, but the time spent on critiquing the system?

I also wondered about the focus on animal foods. One more shot of a slaughterhouse or CAFO would be two or three too many.

My favorite part of the movie was actually getting to see Polyface Farms - even a shot of a Polyface kitty! It was just a second, and it just had one face, but it reminded me of all the photos of cats I took on the tour of organic farms in Iowa in the fall of 2008. I still look at them from time to time.

As long as I'm into quoting this evening, a couple of things from Joel Saladin of Polyface:

>>How far are you from the consequences of your decisions? [about what you eat]

>>We've been successful at hitting the bull's eye of the wrong target.

(How many time could you use that line?)

I found the CEO of Stonyfield a little shifty, personally - must have been the little smirk - and I felt the movie not strong enough in its critique of industrial organic. I mean, if you are going to do the foodie critique, do it.

Finally, the movie as a whole left me with a renewed commitment to advocate for more than consumer solutions - but not because the movie did. It isn't just about what you buy when you go to the store and how you vote with your dollars. It's about becoming producers ourselves, and about informed work on issues.

CAFOs and flu - one possibility

Other blogsters have latched onto one possibility for a flu virus vector - flies that love manure lagoons near Mexican CAFOs. But they seem honest about the fact this is only an hypothesis at this point.

Pigs ARE prodigious defecators.

A vaguely related statistic to ponder from Stuffed and Starved.

In the US feedlots produce 300 million tons of manure a year.

As I recall this is about bovines, though maybe all feedlots and CAFOs - but whatever - that's a ton of s--- per person. Are our meat and dairy habits worth it?

Don't Blame Bacon

even though you know I would love to...

You cannot catch swine flu from eating America's favorite salt-fat supplier.

I'm sure everybody knows that, but somehow I had to say it.

What is puzzling me is that I read on the last spam blast from the Organic Consumers Association that the use of antibiotics in CAFOs contributes to the development of new viruses, and to their resistance to drugs.

Well, flu is caused by a virus, and antibiotics deal with bacteria. I would understand how mutant, resistant bacterial strains might develop in CAFOs. But viruses? On the other hand, CAFOs - with the crowding and generally unhealthful living conditions for the critters - would, it seems to me, be breeding grounds for many things.

But would those conditions necessarily select for viruses that jump species?

Oh well - probably we all can agree that neither CAFOs nor influenza are nice, but a causal link, if one exists, is more complex that any email newsletter can describe.

Fear mongering and elections

I wasn't going to say much about Proposition 2 here, because it seems to me such a no-brainer. We've all seen the Meatrix, right? And we like the A in the LOAF acronym for ethical eating - Animal friendly?

But last night I heard an ad on television which made me very angry. It appealed to people's fear of food borne illness (bird flu!), it appealed to people's xenophobia (food from Mexico!) and it appealed to people's romantic notions of "farmers" - who would all be out of business.

Right.

Please, let's not call people who own CAFO's farmers, with all the farmer in the dell images the word conjures up. Watch the Meatrix again, to deromanticize your notion of industrial farming.

Here's the link to Oprah's exploration of the topic:

http://www.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow_20081008_animals

And here's a nice quotation from the Nicholas Kristof opinion piece that apparently got her going on this topic. (Think of him as a former Oregon farm boy who eats meat.)

"I draw the line at animals being raised in cruel conditions. The law punishes teenage boys who tie up and abuse a stray cat. So why allow industrialists to run factory farms that keep pigs almost all their lives in tiny pens that are barely bigger than they are?"

And one more resource. The National Conference of Churches Eco-justice unit has published a children's curriculum on "Sacred Food" with lots of info about animal cruelty. I just learned of this today, but will review it soon. You will need to go to their site and sign in to download it, an unfortunate feature of their work.

Finally, I just noted on the Prop 2 web site that United Farm Workers support Prop 2. If you can't think about animal rights, think about human rights, and the tremendous toll it takes on workers in CAFOs to disregard the life and comfort of animals day in and day out. Dakota by Martha Grimes was my least favorite book she's written, but the descriptions of the stench, the stress and the learned callousness of those working in a CAFO made me shudder.