Food Inc at the Filmhouse

Once again I was rushing through the evening streets, very nearly late for a show. I was heading to the Filmhouse Cinema for a screening of ‘Food Inc.’, a 2008 documentary. Again, I did not really read up about it beforehand, and was just looking forward to something interesting to fill my evening.

As I rush past, people are watching curling at the winter Olympics, and I overhear : 'Bloody Switzerland is kicking our ass!'

It was five to when I got in, just enough time to go to the Filmhouse café and grab a pint of Polish beer – turns out you can take alcohol into the cinema. That may be just because the Filmhouse is such a small and hippy venue, or perhaps this is a Scotland-wide habit? I may want to investigate.

The busy interior of the Filhouse cafe.

It was a full house, and I had a chance to scrutinise my fellow cinema-goers as we queued up waiting to be let in. Multiple earrings, floppy hairdos, hand-made mittens, tweed and comfy shoes, glasses and capacious shoulder bags; yes, I was decidedly amongst my own kind. They looked like a good, interesting crowd, and this impression proved to be important later on, as it was the post-film discussion which was the most satisfying part of the evening.

The film was fine, it adhered to the usual post-Moore sensational, alarmist, simplistic style, with personal stories of battles against corporations taking the centre stage. There was very little information which was new to me, but then again I’m ‘in food’, and I believe that in general the European public is much better informed then the American one. Still, there were some interesting pieces of information I was not aware of – like the fact that most beef in the US (and I suspect in other places too) is corn, not grass-fed. What that means, in a nutshell, is that the cows are fed petroleum, and that the whole system depends on carbon fuels. The cow’s health suffers too, as it’s digestive system is not designed to deal with starch-heavy food; it has to be provided antibiotics as a result. Finally, corn-fed cows develop massive amounts of e-coli in their gut, and this, combined with industrial-scale slaughter and meat-packing, practically guarantees that at some point, some of the consumers get sick with e-coli and die. One meat processor devised a solution to this problem – he disinfects the meat with ammonia. The end product, after the meat has passed through kilometres of tubes, been treated with gasses, squashed, formed and re-formed again, is a slab of pale meat-derived protein used as ‘hamburger filler’. Talk about the medicine being worse then the illness! (And I’m sure fast-food companies can get away with it as, technically, it still is ‘beef’ – only processed beyond recognition).

Corn-feeding of animals, and the massive availability of corn-derived sugars, makes for foods that are cheap at the counter, but like any good capitalist product drag in their wake a mass of hidden costs (called, in economics externalities – I think of them as the ‘not my problem’ costs). In the case of food, these include: pollution from corn farming, food processing and from cow-produced methane (yes, grass fed cattle fart much less!), soil and environment degradation from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (doesn’t the name just send shivers down your spine?), and finally health costs to the consumer, and thus the entire economy.

I do wonder if someone has calculated how much the economy would improve if we were not at risk from food-linked cancer and diabetes. I wish they would, and I wish the governments then took it seriously. Naïve as I am, I keep believing that – yes – another world is possible. For the final message of the film was just this – it is up to us to chose what we eat. Supermarkets and food-producing companies depend on us for their profit, so we have to shop carefully and vote with the trolley. I initially shrug my shoulders at this, knowing this message to be much too simplistic. Giving the responsibility to the individuals, not to the governing bodies, is only part of the solution; consumers need governing bodies to provide information and safeguard their health and interests, not everyone can afford to shop with the trolley, etc etc, well-rehearsed arguments. In the end, however, I had to admit that, simplistic as this may be, this is the heart of the matter. It’s up to us to make sure that what ends up on our plate is the thing we want to eat.

Speaking of the devil.