Kairos

“We’ve never had food companies this big and this powerful in our history”(2:48).
In 1972, the FDA conducted about 50,000 food safety inspections. In 2006, they conducted just 9,164.
We have a chance as consumers to control the future of the food industry. “When we put an item past the supermarket scanner, we’re voting for local or not; organic or not”(1:25:44) .
“We want to pay the cheapest price for our food. We don’t understand that it comes at a price”(57:20 Eduardo Pena).

In one case, Smithfield had an agreement with immigration authorities to have agents arrest 15 illegal Smithfield workers a day, as long as there were no massive raids on their plants.

1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes (1 in 2 minorities).
The biggest predictor of obesity in the United States is income level.
“It used to be that Type II Diabetes only affected adults, and now its affecting children at epidemic proportions” (43:32 Rosa Soto).

Everyone from the animals, to the growers, to the catchers, to the process workers is at the mercy of corporate. “They have the same mentality towards workers as they do towards the hogs”(51:30).
There has a movement towards illegal immigrants as workers, whom corporate managers view as expendable.

“Cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn. They’re designed to eat grass, and the only reason we feed them corn is because corn is really cheap and makes them fat quickly...There’s some research that indicates that the high corn diet results in E. coli that are acid resistant....[it] evolves and a certain mutation occors and a strain called E. coli 0157:H7 appears on the world stage”(24:11).
1 burger can contain meat from as many as 1000 cattle, which increases the chance of one carrying a pathogen (27:20).
If Kevin’s Law is passed, it would give the USDA the right to shut down plants that violate health standards.

FOOD INC