Food Inc Essay

The movie makes some re aloney good points. The best point is that subsidise corn artificially lowers the cost of animal feed and high-fructose corn syrup. This creates a tax-subsidized economic incentive for people to choose betting food oer nutritious options. Scrapping farm subsidies including corn would be a great topic (that the movie doesnt propose). It has a good segment about how Monsanto is using intellectual property law to unfairly create a US soybean monopoly, suing farmers who never bought Monsanto seed and forcing them to capitulate beca single-valued function of the sheer weight of lawful bills.But the movie descends into sensationalism. For example, it takes a sad case of a tike named Kevin who died of E Coli poisoning after eating a hamburger. It traces the industrys response which is to use ammonia to make sure that almost no E Coli survives and criticizes its solution while playing ominous music in the background along with unanswered cries of anguish from Kevins mother. It fails to mention that (1) all E Coli dies when meat is cooked properly (2) using ammonia to kill E Coli is an ingenious idea thats very effective (3) the food with the great risk of E Coli poisoning is organic spinach.It doesnt mention how the fast food industry eliminated the use of hydrogenated vegetable oil, almost completely eliminating trans avoirdupois weight from fast food. It has a scene comparing the resources used by a free range cow farmer who has about 20 overawe versus an industrial slaughterhouse that processes thousands failing to mention that if the free range farmer produced cows on the akin scale he would use 4x to 10x the resources for the same output. The movie takes an ill-advised stance against genetically modified food (google Norman Borlaugh).It makes several self-defeating arguments (like arguing that our industrially-produced food is infected and resource- intense and that we should pay to a greater extent to eat organic which is ac tually much more resource intensive and more likely to be contaminated by bacteria because of the use of poop as fertilizer instead of nitrates). The movie makes some arouse points. But the whole big business bad thing is a completely useless attitude that is a constant source of wrath to me personally.People and businesses have, do, will, and should act in their own best interests. The question is which policies should be created to incentivize wise outcomes? Regarding Monsanto, the problem isnt evil big business, its that the US should reform its legal system to act like the UKs where if you sue someone and lose then you have to pay their legal fees. That would foresee Monsantos abuses of IP law (and would accomplish tort reform in medical malpractice).