Eric Harmatz's Blog

Food Inc evoked many different emotions from me, from concern to the animals being treated improperly to sadness over Kevin’s death from E. coli, and all the commons themes/emotions have to do with the deplorable lack of corporate responsibility.

We are constantly told by our parents growing up that our choices have consequences; good choices have good consequences and bad choices have bad consequences. After watching this film, it is apparent that these food corporations are somehow exempt from the consequences of their negligence. They are uses improper procedures and it is having a bad effect, the animals are getting sick and passing it along to the humans. This is normally because the procedures they are taking yield more money for them (such as hiring cheap illegal labor and feeding cows corn that takes less time to make them fat enough for slaughtering) with little to no regard to what their choices are doing.

It saddens me that these companies have so much control over our lives, and we don’t even realize it because we normally don’t think twice about the originations of our food and how the animals/workers have been treated, and how all this “greed” surrounds this food.

I believe what hurt me the most was that the food company that was responsible for Kevin’s death by E. coli didn’t accept responsibility for his untimely death, acting like tainted meat was beyond their control. It is obvious it wasn’t and by taking some simple procedures of caring about the customers and not just “How can we make more money” this could have been prevented.

I think this states that as a society we are very greedy and care only about money and not basic human respect. It really annoys me that this is the way corporate America is, from oil companies down to the food we purchase. I was definitely impacted by this and will try to be more conscious about where my food comes, even though it was hard. I really learned a lot about cooking from the Chi Chocolat demonstration today that showed how cooking your own food could be fun and doesn’t need to contain meat. I enjoyed the presentation and think the timing was great to do that activity after watching Food Inc, if we were to do it before I don’t think I would have gotten the same affect out of it. I would have asked “where’s the meat?”

One of a discussion prompts that I would have liked to have brought up in a Socratic Seminar was “All things considered, was the organic yogurt’s contract with Wal*Mart as good as the farmer made it sound.” We have to consider that the only reason Wal*Mart wanted it was to stay current with the trends of the consumers in order to earn even more money, the only green thing corporations seem to care about.