Legal Niches

Food, Inc.

By Jim Chen at al.

A new documentary, Food, Inc., takes aim at "our nation's food industry" with particular emphasis on "exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA."

In a New York Times column called "Lettuce from the garden, with worms," Nicholas D. Kristof comments on Food, Inc. and the agricultural system depicted in that film: "More broadly, it has become clear that the same factors that impelled me toward factory-produced meat and vegetables ? cheap, predictable food ? also resulted in a profoundly unhealthy American diet." In criticizing "America?s health care system," Kristof believes that "one reason for our health problems is our industrialized agriculture system."

Herewith the preview of a movie that berates "bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad" as part of a system that yields "new strains of E. coli" responsible for "illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually" and that is associated with "widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults."

Full post as published by Agricultural Law on June 21, 2009 (boomark / email).