Towards the end of the new documentary Food Inc. 2, the filmmakers explore alternatives to the food mass-produced by giant corporations that is doing so much damage to our health and the environment.
After meeting people who turn plants into “fish” and “chicken wings” and promise “dairy products without cows” and “honey without bees,” the scene shifts to chickens, pigs, and cows being grown from cells. Moving on to the large iron bat. This, we are told, could be a future alternative to planet-warming battery farms and vast acres of cows.
But how does it taste? Eat a piece of chicken and give it a thumbs up. However, the filmmakers later revealed that they later learned that the chicken did not come out of the vat after all. “We felt a little misunderstood,” manager Robert Kenner said. “It feels more like a Silicon Valley product than a food product.”
This scene perfectly encapsulates the challenges faced by those seeking to disrupt the food production system, which Kenner exposed in Food Inc. 16 years ago. This groundbreaking documentary exposes how a small number of sprawling corporations have taken over the American food chain, to the detriment of the United States. Farmers, consumers, animals and the planet.
In Food, Inc 2, Kenner and co-director Melissa Robredo assess progress, and the news isn’t good. As the chicken incident showed, change is not always what it seems.
Director Kenner explores how the coronavirus pandemic will force us to eat what we do, and how his original film will help loosen corporate control over it. This prompted us to reconsider the question of whether it was useful or not.
“We really thought we could change the system a little bit at a time, and good things came out of both our film and the book and other films. There’s a real food movement, “There were farmers markets and there was awareness about what we were eating. But 16 years later, the pandemic has revealed the brutality of this integrated system,” he said.
The filmmakers visit Waterloo, Iowa, where the multinational company Tyson Foods has one of its many slaughterhouses. Tyson has refused to close its factories in the midst of the pandemic, even though thousands of employees have contracted the coronavirus and 38 have died. Local communities accused the company of helping spread the virus and costing lives.
In Waterloo, we meet Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson, who is eating a huge amount of food that looks very unhealthy. Thompson said Tyson is one of the area’s largest employers and “we don’t want to alienate them.”
But with his life at risk, Thompson entered the Tyson plant with public health officials.
“We saw people working elbow to elbow, hands on top of each other. There were no masks, there were no regulations, there were no real coordinated policies to protect each other. And “I’ve heard from people who backed out of the line, threw up on the floor, and then went right back to work,” he said. “By the end of the month, we had 1,300 positive cases out of 2,500 employees, and it started seeping out of the factory and into our community.”
The death toll increased day by day. Still, Tyson refused to close the factory. The industry began running ads to scare the public that if the plants closed, the United States would face a severe meat shortage.
Tyson then played an ace, convincing the Trump administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to keep the slaughterhouse open. This law was written in 1950 to give the government the power to require manufacturers to shift production towards war demands, but now it is now used to force workers to risk their lives for the company’s profits. It is used to.
“The most frightening thing is that they perverted democracy,” Kenner said. “Instead of forcing companies to do what is good for the country, they used the Defense Production Act to force workers to do what the companies wanted and get them back to work.”
Tyson claimed he was doing this to feed the United States, even though most of the production was exported to China. Thompson called the profits made by keeping slaughterhouses open “blood money.”
“They didn’t care about the people and too many people paid the price,” he said.
So how do we change the system in the face of such a brazen display of power?
Food, Inc 2 covers many areas, from worker conditions to local agricultural efforts, including ensuring that most migrant workers are paid decent wages for fruit picking. Some have real impact, such as campaigns to get you paid.
Director Kenner said he was “shocked” by one of the film’s most shocking revelations. Farmers are paid less than 15 cents for every dollar they produce. Much of the profit comes from turning healthy foods into ultra-processed junk by adding artificial flavors, sweeteners, emulsifiers, and preservatives to crops and meats to give them completely different tastes. Food, Inc 2 points out that these things cause us to literally eat ourselves to death.
This problem is worse in the United States than in most other regions. Ultra-processed foods account for 58% of Americans’ energy intake. In Italy it is 17%.
One of the biggest challenges to building a different food system is the monopoly that Tyson and other giant companies have created by buying out their competitors and creating a monopoly until a few companies dominate production. And they use their financial power to overturn regulations and ensure the continuation of subsidies that benefit the production of ultra-processed foods. These few companies are even more dominant now than they were when Kenner produced the original documentary.
“We are witnessing a system distorted by corporate money. Ironically, we are more like a Soviet-style economy than an American capitalist economy. There is no competition anymore, and we “We’re serving food that’s unhealthy. It’s unhealthy for the people who eat it. It’s unhealthy for the people who grow the food, and it’s unhealthy for the planet.”
As Robredo points out, the problem is not a lack of regulation, but the reluctance of successive governments to enforce the law. “What we need is enforcement. This regulation is not just to promote competition, but also to prevent companies from having access, control, or undue influence over regulators, the government, and ultimately the president.” It was written to prevent that from happening,” she said.
Montana farmer and U.S. senator Jon Tester tells filmmakers there’s only one place to beat the system, and that’s Washington, D.C. Why don’t you agree with Jon Tester? I can’t go there.
Ultimately, though, Food, Inc 2 is less a roadmap for change than a recognition of the scale of the challenge. The filmmakers’ search for a solution leads them to a company that claims its commitment to better food is driven by environmental concerns.
Pat Brown, founder of Impossible Foods, talks about the need to remove animals from the food system. He said replacing cows could result in a 30-year pause in greenhouse gas emissions. There he makes “meat” from plants. But at the end of the day, the famous Impossible Burger, now available at every Burger King in the country, is just an ultra-processed food.
Impossible Foods is followed by a flurry of alternative meat companies. But where does that money come from? Tyson Foods is rushing into the business, along with hedge funds and tech investors who have long put profits first.
“Emerging industries are at risk of becoming dominated by corporations,” Robredo said. “We were trying to show that you start out with great values, but along the way they can be compromised.”
