Ke Xu
Donna Holley
ENG 113
February 25, 2014
Whose Fault? Nowadays, food security is a hotly-debated topic all over the world. It is said that if you like eating burger, you would better not know how it made. You cannot imagine how poisonous the component of food is and how nasty the productive process is. Food, Inc., a documentary film reveals the food production problems currently in the United States, raised my attention to this area. Several segments are included in this film, like industrial production of meat, grains and vegetables, labeled economically and environmentally unsustainable. This film drives people concerned about food security and physical health instead of picking it up literally from daily news. I know little about food production system in the United States, but it should work better than that in my country for the worse situation there. From my perspective, in the food production system, all consumers, producers and regulators cooperate together, which makes the market runs smoothly. The crisis today cannot be merely blamed on only one aspect of this three. Meat production, including chicken, beef and pork, is first introduced in the film. Decades ago, people got used to fast food because it is of convenience and cheap, a growing quantity of drive-ins followed. Like in the film, the family buy breakfast in drive-ins and have it in their car every day. The parents said they have no time and the food in market is not that cheap. There are thousands of families same as that in the film. The food market need can be calculated. In addition, people will not care about where the meat come from, how it produced and whether it is secure or not since they even have no time to prepare it. ‘People only concern about cheap, not ecofriendly.’ said by one interviewee in the film. More serious is healthy problems incurred. Heart attack, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity gain incidence continuously, making lots of people in a dilemma. Moreover, the age of these patients tends to be lower. Less safe food and unhealthy eating habits result in this phenomenon. A mother lost her son in the film and after that she began to take food security seriously. The similar tragedies happen every day but few people pay attention to it. For consumers, they are the main part of the food system. They are entitled to ask for healthy, secure and green food. However, most of them would rather regret until tragedy happens than seek solutions before. Producers are supposed to shoulder more responsibilities. Consumers show them trust and buy their food, but they fail to live up to the expectation. Nowadays, food production mainly implements industrialization. The top four meat producers occupy more than 80 percent market shares in the United States, which causes the power is only concentrated in some companies. For more profit, producers supply cheap but contaminated food. Chickens never see the light of day, fed chemical fertilizers and live in crowd. Grains and vegetables are largely irrigated by water with pesticides. Farmers are forced to use the seeds the food company provides, genetically modified with high production. These food sealed by fancy package appeals consumers, hiding the ugly inside. ‘Are they able to keep their soul?’ Chasing for money and power, human are greedy. They focus on the current benefit and