Food Inc.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand."

This is the opening line of a new documentary on how food is produced in the United States, focusing particularly on the industrial food system. I've touched on this issue in previous posts (see: "Support Organic", Dec. 19, 2008; "Organic: Good for Earth", Feb. 3, 2009), and I think it is extremely important.

The way we in the industrial world produce food is unsustainable, destructive to the environment and yields food of dubious nutritional value whose main virtue is that it's cheap. This system is excellent economically (at least if you don't take into account the money spent treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc., and the costs of pollution of streams, rivers, lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the air, etc.) but it is terrible in every other way. It persists, I believe, primarily because most people don't know the facts about it. If every person in the United States spent just one single day educating themselves about how our food is produced, that would be enough to bring about massive changes. The facts are powerful and overwhelming.

At least that's how it looks to me. You might disagree. But either way, you owe it to yourself to be informed, because this issue is so important and so universal. This film looks like a great place to start.

Here is their excellent website, which is loaded with information: http://foodincmovie.com/

And here's the trailer: