Food, Inc. Notes
The way we eat has changed more in last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.
We still use the image of agrarian America to sell the food.
47,000 products in average supermarket
No seasons…tomatoes ripened with ethylene gas
No bones in meat…provides a veil between what it is and how it is
No just what we’re eating, but what we can say and what we know.
Eric Schlosser, Fastfood Nation
Tyson biggest meat packing company in the history of the world
Eric S.
CAFO (Controlled Area Feeding Operation)
Michael Pollan
DC
efficiency leading to massive problems…they don’t go back and see what’s wrong with the system, they try to develop some hi-tech fixes to resolve that problem, but lead to others
ammonia and ammonia hydroxide used in processing meat (70% of US burgers now…gunning for 100%)
“I’m a mechanic…we design our own machinery.”
“It’s a marriage of science and technology.”
“We’ve skewed our food system to the bad calories, and it’s not an accident. The reason those foods are cheaper is because those are the ones that are heavily subsidized…The snack food calories come from the commodity crops, the wheat, the corn, and from the soybeans. The biggest predictor of obesity is income level.”
“1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes.”
Faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper
I think people are fooling themselves if they think that the people making these decisions (corporations) don’t know the consequences.
Jumps to largest slaughterhouse in the world: Smithfield Hog Processing Plant (Tarheel, NC)
“Same mentality toward workers as they do toward hogs”
Comparing to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Teddy Roosevelt took on the beef trust
Unions made meatpacking worker one of the best union job in US
Then fast food comes in
Now meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US
Meat packers began actively recruiting in Mexico after subsidized US corn put Mexican corn farmers out of business (NAFTA)
Government cracks down on illegal workers and not the companies
“Hidden Costs”
Environmental costs, health costs, subsidies, labor conditions
Natural Products Expo
“From Seed to Supermarket”
1980s Supreme Court said you could patent life, which opened the door to corporations owning the most valuable parts of life (crops_
Monsanto story
“The Veil”
“Shock the System”
Stoneyfield dude argues that buying groceries is voting. I’m not sure hoe this actually fits into his earlier argument that in order to save the planet change has to happen faster. I guess he doesn’t mean all that fast.
Pollan argues for changes at the policy level
Food Chains Notes (Prime)
Immokalee, FL
California
Back to Immokalee
The way we eat has changed more in last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.
We still use the image of agrarian America to sell the food.
47,000 products in average supermarket
No seasons…tomatoes ripened with ethylene gas
No bones in meat…provides a veil between what it is and how it is
No just what we’re eating, but what we can say and what we know.
Eric Schlosser, Fastfood Nation
- Industrial food system began with fast food
- McDonald’s brought the factory system to the kitchen
- One worker do one thing again and again and again
- Could pay workers a low wage and replace them easily
- Uniformity, conformity, and cheapness
- This big fast food chains want big suppliers, and now there are a handful of companies controlling our food system/
- 1970s 5 beef packers controlled 25% of the market
- 2008 the top 4 control more than 80% of the market
- Same thing happening in pork
- Even if you don’t eat fast food, you’re eating what’s produced by this system
Tyson biggest meat packing company in the history of the world
- Birds now raised and slaughtered in half the time they were 50 years ago, but now they’re twice as big. Chicken redesigned to have large breasts.
- Changed the farmer…
- Tobacco growers in the south switched to chickens
- Antibiotics put into feed…bacteria builds up a resistance
- Farmers are indebted 80-300k per chicken house
- Companies demand upgrades for new equipment or they lose the contract
- 2 chicken houses=500k borrowed, 2 chicken houses=18k/year
Eric S.
- Wanted to trace the source of his food
- Illusion of diversity in grocery stores
- Kept ending up in a cornfield in Iowa: so much of our food is a clever rearrangement of corn
- 30% of US land is used to grow corn
- Paid to overproduce corn because it’s what multinational corporations want
- Farm policy determines our food
- We subsidize farmers by the bushel
CAFO (Controlled Area Feeding Operation)
Michael Pollan
- Tracing e coli in meat
- Run off from factory farms=how e coli gets into vegetables
- Government appoints agribusiness leaders and lobbyists to oversee federal regulation, which means none
- 1972 FDA did approx. 50k food safety inspections
- 2006 = 9164
- Concentration of farming means bad pathogens get spread far and wide more easily
- 13 slaughterhouses in the US today that process the majority of beef
DC
- Food Safety Advocates
- Diana DeGette (D-Colorado): We’ve moved to self-regulation
- E coli 0157H7
- Story about child dying from e coli poisoning
- Courts decide USDA couldn’t enforce their policies 2008
- Kevin’s Law: give power back to USDA
- (Did this law ever pass?)
efficiency leading to massive problems…they don’t go back and see what’s wrong with the system, they try to develop some hi-tech fixes to resolve that problem, but lead to others
ammonia and ammonia hydroxide used in processing meat (70% of US burgers now…gunning for 100%)
“I’m a mechanic…we design our own machinery.”
“It’s a marriage of science and technology.”
“We’ve skewed our food system to the bad calories, and it’s not an accident. The reason those foods are cheaper is because those are the ones that are heavily subsidized…The snack food calories come from the commodity crops, the wheat, the corn, and from the soybeans. The biggest predictor of obesity is income level.”
“1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes.”
Faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper
I think people are fooling themselves if they think that the people making these decisions (corporations) don’t know the consequences.
Jumps to largest slaughterhouse in the world: Smithfield Hog Processing Plant (Tarheel, NC)
“Same mentality toward workers as they do toward hogs”
Comparing to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
Teddy Roosevelt took on the beef trust
Unions made meatpacking worker one of the best union job in US
Then fast food comes in
Now meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in the US
Meat packers began actively recruiting in Mexico after subsidized US corn put Mexican corn farmers out of business (NAFTA)
Government cracks down on illegal workers and not the companies
“Hidden Costs”
Environmental costs, health costs, subsidies, labor conditions
Natural Products Expo
- Organic is one of the fastest growing segments of food industry
- If we only say we’re gonna buy food from the most perfect system in 100 miles, we won’t get there.
- All these companies being acquired by agribusiness and huge corporations.
- Trying to replace products. I don’t see how this affects things immediately.
“From Seed to Supermarket”
1980s Supreme Court said you could patent life, which opened the door to corporations owning the most valuable parts of life (crops_
Monsanto story
- Roundup Ready soybeans with patented gene1996=2% of soybeans in US, 2008=0ver 90%
- Illegal to save your own seed, Monsanto will sue them for patent violation supposedly though it sounds like a roving band of thugs
- When you genetically modify a crop, you own that patent.
- Land grant universities used to develop public seed. The vast majority of plant breeding was done in public institutions.
- Monsanto has a black list. They use it to put people out of business.
“The Veil”
- Clarence Thomas on decisions about seed saving
- Monsanto tied to Bush and Clinton administration
- Lists all these people who are appointed to federal positions and work for agribusiness
- SB-63 Passed in California, Schwarzenegger vetoed it
- Fast food fought against listing calories, about divulging transfats
- Meatpacking fought country of origin labeling for years
- Fought not to label genetically modified foods
- More laws protecting corporations and agribusiness than people
- Moe Parr case
“Shock the System”
- Everything is getting concentrated into fewer hands, making the entire system more precarious
- Modern agribusiness depends heavily on fossil fuel
Stoneyfield dude argues that buying groceries is voting. I’m not sure hoe this actually fits into his earlier argument that in order to save the planet change has to happen faster. I guess he doesn’t mean all that fast.
Pollan argues for changes at the policy level
Food Chains Notes (Prime)
Immokalee, FL
- Shows the life of Farmworkers, tomato pickers
- “The history of farm labor in the United States is the history of exploitation.”
- Cuts to MLK speech
- Supply chain: intricate system of farmers, farm workers, and distributors
- Claims supermarkets set all the rules and who gets paid what
- Coalition of Immokalee Workers
- Taking on Publix
- Asking for 1 cent more per bucket to workers
- Would double their wages (??)
- Publix refused
- CIW launch a hunger strike in front of Publix headquarters
- Six-Day Strike
- Immokalee in 1960
- Edward Murrow story
- Looks largely the same except it’s black people
- Farmworkers at the bottom of a supply chain dominated by fast food, food service, and supermarkets
- Supermarkets earn more than Monsanto, Goldmann Sachs, Microsoft, and Apple
- Walmart changed the game, forced consolidation
- Today= Walmart, Kroger, Publix, and Safeway
- When a supermarket can dictate costs down the entire supply chain, a free market no longer exists…called a monopsony
- Asking for paying a penny per pound not bushel
- In this country, “you are poor because you’re making others rich.”
California
- More migrant farmworkers than any other state
- California economy always relied on exploited, cheap labor, first Native Americans, then Mexicans
- Caesar Chavez, lettuce fields of California, helped found UFW Union
- RFK stepped in and ended a historic strike, sitting down with havez
- Piqued at 100k farmworkers
- 1980s California made it more difficult for farmworkers to organize
- Discusses the conditions for migrant laborers in Napa
- Wine…labor costs 25 cents regardless
- Addresses the role NAFTA played in increasing migrant labor pool in US
- Moves into global migrant labor
Back to Immokalee
- Companies chalk it up to labor disputes and say they have no power
- Slavery ring discovered in Immokalee in 2007
- 1995 Strike, first big CIW action
- Early 2000s
- took it to taco bell
- per more per pound and supply chain code of conduct
- Taco Bell joined fair food program (Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Trader Joe’s)
- Supermarket chains still a huge hole
- Since it’s inception fair food…
- $11 million more to workers
- Set up ways for women to report sexual harassment
- Eliminated slavery on the farms that work with CIW
- Walmart joined in Jan 2104
- Publix didn’t join
- Fairfoodnow.com