What's in the food you eat?

Yesterday I saw the film, Food Inc. and if you haven't seen it yet, I urge you to find it. It will change the way you think about the food you eat.

Very simply, it's a fine piece of investigative journalism on the misuse of power by the food industry in the US. Some of those practices almost certainly exist in Britain and the EU. They are doing you harm.

Two things, in particular, bothered me about the film's content. One, it revealed how much danger we are in from the way animals are factory-processed for our consumption. The other was the way that five or six major food corporations dominate the industry, exploiting and intimidating their suppliers (farmers) in a so-called free society.

On the first point, did you know that 'ground beef' (mince) prepared for commercial hamburgers seems to have contained every bit of the animal parts, including those you would throw away yourself? And did you know that cattle raised for beef stand all day in deep piles of their own manure, which is barely washed off when they are slaughtered, so that it affects (and even infects) the meat that goes on sale? And did you know that the millk you drink probably contains the pus from infected teats and traces of cow dung?

The film also told the story of a healthy young boy who ate a hamburger and was dead within 12 days. His mother has been campaigning for something to be done to prevent it happening again. E-coli is being bred into foodstuffs, and the food companies don't seem to care.

You don't want to know about the way chickens are reared. It's all driven by money.

You think it doesn't happen here? Well, I feed my local foxes on well-known brands of dog food which I buy in major supermarkets. Quite often they walk right past the food and refuse to eat it. A friend has a cat that similarly ignores the tinned food she puts out. Why do you suppose that is?

Could it be that the carcasses of diseased farm animals are used for pet food? What else is in the processed food we buy? Start reading labels and see how much 'real' food you are getting, and how much is some form of corn derivative. And start taking notice of the conditions in which farm animals are kept before slaughter. You may never eat meat again.

So what can we do about it? Well, consider what happened to the tobacco industry. Laws were introduced to protect us from the effects of tobacco smoke because of people power. Buy organic food. Raise this as an issue at the General Election. Vote for those who promise to expose bad practices in food preparation.

You have the power. Time to use it.

Phillip