Food Inc Essay

The motion picture makes some really good organises. The best point is that subsidized corn artificially lowers the cost of animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup. This creates a tax-subsidized economic incentive for people to choose fast food everyplace nutritious options. Scrapping farm subsidies including corn would be a great idea (that the word-painting doesnt propose). It has a good segment about how Monsanto is using keen property law to unfairly create a US soybean monopoly, suing farmers who never bought Monsanto seed and forcing them to capitulate because of the sheer weight of court-ordered bills.But the movie descends into sensationalism. For example, it takes a sad case of a kid named Kevin who died of E Coli poisoning after eating a hamburger. It traces the industrys response which is to use ammonia water to make sure that almost no E Coli survives and criticizes its solution while playing ominous music in the background along with unanswered cries of worry f rom Kevins mother. It fails to mention that (1) all E Coli dies when meat is cooked properly (2) using ammonia to kill E Coli is an ingenious idea thats very telling (3) the food with the greatest risk of E Coli poisoning is native spinach.It doesnt mention how the fast food industry eliminated the use of hydrogenated vegetable oil, almost only eliminating trans fat from fast food. It has a scene comparing the resources used by a free range cow farmer who has about 20 overawe versus an industrial slaughterhouse that processes thousands failing to mention that if the free range farmer produced cows on the same scale he would use 4x to 10x the resources for the same output. The movie takes an ill-advised stance against genetically modified food (google Norman Borlaugh).It makes several self-defeating arguments (like arguing that our industrially-produced food is infected and resource-intensive and that we should pay more to eat organic which is actually much more resource intens ive and more likely to be contaminated by bacteria because of the use of poop as fertilizer instead of nitrates). The movie makes some interesting points. But the whole bulky business bad thing is a completely useless attitude that is a constant source of irritation to me personally.People and businesses have, do, will, and should act in their own best interests. The question is which policies should be created to incentivize wise outcomes? Regarding Monsanto, the problem isnt evil big business, its that the US should reform its legal system to act like the UKs where if you sue someone and lose then you have to pay their legal fees. That would prevent Monsantos abuses of IP law (and would accomplish tort reform in medical malpractice).