Commentary

You Are What You Eat

Congratulations are in order for Mississippi which -- a new report from the Trust for America's Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation declares -- has the nation's highest rate of adult obesity, 32.5 percent, for a scale-groaning fifth year in a row. The runner-ups, all in the +30% range: Alabama, West Virginia, and Tennessee. Overall obesity rates among adults rose in 23 states over the past year and didn't decline anywhere.

As the weather turns seasonally sticky, you might want to kill 93 minutes in an air-conditioned theater watching Food, Inc. Besides wanting to ask for a refund on that popcorn and soda, you'll learn why we are all getting fatter and generally unhealthier. The film explains in a pretty compelling way how a handful of corporations control our nation's food supply. Although the companies try to maintain the myth that our food still comes from little farms with red barns and white picket fences, our food is actually raised on massive "factory farms" and processed in mega industrial plants. The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them. Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest, resulting in new strains of E. coli bacteria, which sickens roughly 73,000 Americans annually.

Because of the high proliferation of processed foods derived from corn, Americans are facing epidemic levels of diabetes among adults, and -- as the stats confirm -- we are all getting fatter, especially our Xbox-playing children. And all of it is happening with the complicity of the fed's regulatory agencies, the USDA and the FDA. The film exposes a "revolving door" of executives from giant food corporations in and out of Washington D.C. that has resulted in a lack of oversight and illuminates how this dysfunctional political system often operates at the expense of the American consumer. Farmers have been silenced -- afraid to talk about what's happening to the nation's food supply -- for fear of retaliation and lawsuits from giant corporations.

I confess that I have been in a pitched battle with my wife, who for the past five years has been urging the family to cut down on processed foods, buy organic and hit the farmer's market each weekend -- all recommendations made by the producers of Food, Inc. at the end of the movie. I am one of those guys who needs a doctor to lean over his body and say: "Keep eating that fried chicken and those iced oatmeal cookies and the next time you'll be in the mortuary, instead of the ER."

It is interesting to see an entire industry bent on producing the highest volume at the lowest cost no matter what the consequences for the consumer (or says the film, its impact on the environment, worker rights and smaller farmers who don't have the means to fight back). I am certain they would argue that they are only "reacting to the market" giving consumers what they want. But the truth is a good deal more insidious.

While I am by nature not a petition signer or a grassroots-level organizer, I urge you to go see the film and make your own decisions. Better yet, take the entire lardass adult population of Mississippi (even if a few hundred thousand have to sit in the front row). As for me, I'm going to listen to my wife. For a change.

1 comment about "You Are What You Eat".
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  1. Alan Stamm, July 3, 2009 at 9:11 a.m.

    Before, after or instead of seeing 'Food, Inc.' [in limited release, not yet on DVD], anyone who eats also can gain an eye-opening perspective from one of these fine paperbacks by influential author Michael Pollan, who appears in the documentary:

    * In Defense of Food

    * The Omnivore's Dilemma

    --> Learn more at: www.michaelpollan.com

    Bon appetit!

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