Making (Informed) Choices

In the past 50 years, the nation's food source has changed dramatically. The emergence of the fast food industry was the catalyst for this change. Books such as Fast Food Nation and In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto are today's Upton Sinclair-style exposés. Community seminars are also shedding light on the deleterious impact of the shift from family farms to highly mechanized agri-conglomerates on our environment and the nation's health.

Yet film is often unparalleled when it comes to getting a message across. This is certainly true of the recent documentary film "Food, Inc.," produced by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser. American consumers, it maintains, are blithely unaware of where their food sources with most laboring under the impression that it comes from bucolic farms. Viewers see, instead, a highly mechanized process run by poorly paid workers who are nothing more than human machines doing one simple task over and over again. The workers are treated only slightly better than the animals they are processing.

The message is clear. Consumers desirous of changing this scenario can make a difference by buying locally and/or making educated choices at the grocery store. Big business responds to consumer dollars.

Many people will choose not to see the film or read the books. One reason is they don't want to know. One person stated, "I don't want to see it (Food, Inc.) as I might become a vegetarian." It is a sad situation when one chooses not to know rather than be faced with having to make a change. It IS possible to have the information and NOT make a change but isn't it just better to know rather than to live in a deluded state? Ultimately the illusion falls away and then it is often too late to make another choice.