Eat, Drink, Think, Change - NYT's KIM SEVERSON on "Food, Inc."

(FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES - Saturday, June 6, 2009 )
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/movies/07seve.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3

FILM
Eat, Drink, Think, Change

Is the food party over? Left, fans of Burger King in the new documentary “Food, Inc.”. The sumptuous banquet depicted in the 1987 film “Babette’s Feast”.

By KIM SEVERSON
Published: June 3, 2009

MOVIES about food used to make you want to eat.

Morgan Spurlock on the road to obesity in “ Super Size Me” (2004).
The decade that spanned the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was particularly fruitful. It took heroic resolve to walk out of the Japanese spaghetti western “Tampopo” and not head directly to a ramen bar.

Cooks spent entire months trying to recreate “Babette’s Feast” and dreamed of rolling out pasta with Stanley Tucci in “Big Night.”

By the time Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” came out in 1994, moviegoers had come to expect food films filled with glistening dumplings, magical dessert and technically perfect kitchen scenes.

But that was then, before Wal-Mart started selling organic food and Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Before E. coli was a constant in the food supply, before politicians tried to tax soda and before anyone gave much thought to the living conditions of chickens.

Into this world comes “Food, Inc.,” a documentary on the state of the nation’s food system that opens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday.

“Food, Inc.” is part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces. It’s eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all.

“All we have are these little canisters of film, and we’re launching them at a fortress,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a filmmaker and farmer who is finishing a documentary on the young agrarian movement called “The Greenhorns.”

In 2004 Morgan Spurlock took a mini-Michael Moore approach with “Super Size Me,” a documentary that showed what happens when a man eats nothing but fast food for a month. (His waistline ends up looking a little more like Mr. Moore’s, and his sex life takes a dive.)

There has even been a feature film. In 2006 the nonfiction book “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser became a narrative (starring Greg Kinnear) about the restaurant industry, obesity and meat-packing labor exploitation.

Mr. Schlosser is a producer of, and a character in, “Food, Inc.,” in which the director Robert Kenner takes a sprawling look at the perils of Big Food. The film is being promoted as an exposé of “the highly mechanized underbelly” of the seemingly benign food people eat every day.

“Food, Inc.” begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000,” Michael Pollan says as the film opens. Mr. Pollan, an author and occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is the spiritual guide for the film and serves as its narrator. “A lot of it is hard to watch,” he conceded, “but I think people are ready to take a good, unflinching look at how their food is produced.”

Mr. Kenner, who has previously tackled subjects like war and endangered species in a series of television documentaries, didn’t know much about food when he embarked on “Food, Inc.” about six years ago. But after warnings from lawyers, stonewalling from food companies and months on the ground in farm fields, grocery stores and Congressional offices, he became a hard-core campaigner for better food.

“It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ” Mr. Kenner said.

Much of the film takes direct aim at the usual suspects — big meat packing companies, Monsanto, the federal Agriculture Department. But Mr. Kenner also offers a sympathetic study of people whose lives have been hurt both from producing food on such a mass scale and eating the results.

“I think what’s important here was connecting all these little pieces,” he said. “Individually they didn’t seem so insidious.”

In a section that shows how modern, mass-produced chickens have been bred to grow to market size in half the time, a woman under contract with Perdue speaks out about the physical toll such rapid growth takes on the chickens and the stifling conditions in which they live.

She also explains the financial stranglehold large chicken companies have on growers. She ends up losing her contract because she refuses to enclose her chicken houses completely.

Viewers who haven’t thought much about how all that food in the grocery store got to be there will likely find it hard to toss a few packages of pork chops and some Froot Loops in the cart and call it a day. Some viewers will undoubtedly look away during the meat cutting and processing scenes. For parents the eye-averting moment will come during repeated slow-motion scenes of a 2-year-old’s last vacation. His mother, now a food-safety advocate, explains in a tearful voice-over the gruesome details of his death after he ate hamburger tainted with E. coli.

For people steeped in food politics the most revealing scenes are the least graphic. Monsanto goes after an elderly man whose life has been devoted to the practice of cleaning seeds so farmers can replant crops. The chemical company, which has patented herbicide-resistant soybeans and corn, says he is helping farmers plant Monsanto seeds illegally.

The man is forced in a deposition to expose longtime friends and clients who are suspected of using the seeds illegally. He eventually gives up the legal fight when he runs out of money. Monsanto recently posted a Web page (monsanto.com/foodinc) devoted to countering the film’s version of events.

Mr. Kenner also visits a poor family with a diabetic father. During their trip to a grocery store it’s easy to see why they pass on broccoli in favor of fast-food hamburgers, which fill bellies longer and cheaper.

“Food, Inc.” has the endorsement of all kinds of people in what some call “the good food movement.” Alice Waters is a champion, and so is Martha Stewart. She has been arranging screenings for her staff and tweeting about the film: “See the film then tell me organic is too expensive for you and your family. It is so upsetting that good food is hard to find.”

A screening that Mr. Pollan described as uncomfortable was even arranged for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

Much of the buzz has been ginned up by an impressive full-court media campaign, which is spinning the movie as hard as a food company promoting a new product.

To coincide with the opening the lids of millions of containers of Stonyfield Farm yogurt have been turned into “Food, Inc.” ads, thanks in large part to the company’s chairman, Gary Hirshberg. One segment of the film is dedicated to his efforts to produce organic food on a mass scale.

The documentary even has its own companion book, which is more than 300 pages long and filled with essays about global warming, hunger and pesticides along with tips on how to talk to a farmer and improve school lunch.

Because “Food, Inc.” was produced by Participant Media (among others), the company that backed “An Inconvenient Truth,” comparisons are inevitable. But there’s a big difference. After watching Al Gore explain the horrors of climate change, moviegoers can turn off a few lights, think about a Prius and call it a day. People who leave “Food, Inc.” still have to eat.

And the filmmakers know that. At the end of the film a series of suggestions run across the screen. Plant a garden. Cook a meal for the family. Contact Congress.

“I want people to feel like they can do something,” said Naomi Starkman, a Northern California media consultant and aspiring farmer who helped create the messages. “You make a choice three times a day on what you want to eat. That is power.”

Food Freedom is under Assault, H.R. 759 Worse than H.R. 875

Food Freedom is under Assault, H.R. 759 Worse than H.R. 875

Food Freedom is under Assault, H.R. 759 Worse than H.R. 875
Friday, April 24, 2009 by: Ethan Huff, citizen journalist

(NaturalNews) Salmonella outbreaks, food contamination, and other regulatory deficiencies over the nation's food supply during the past several years have led to a barrage of proposed legislation aimed at improving food safety. H.R. 875, H.R. 759, and H.R. 1332, are three major bills that have been proposed in recent months to address food safety issues, all of which have been tailored to benefit large, industrial food processors at the expense of small, family farms. Watchdog groups, including the Cornucopia Institute, are warning that H.R. 759, expected to be voted upon before Memorial Day, is the bill most likely to make it out of committee to Congress for a vote. Various portions of H.R. 875 and H.R. 1332 are expected to be implemented within the final version of H.R. 759.

Authored and introduced by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) on January 28, 2009, H.R. 759, The FDA Globalization Act, would do the very thing its name implies; it would grant full authority to the FDA to set minimum, "science-based" standards for what it deems the safe production and harvesting of produce in the "global market".

According to the Cornucopia Institute, all "food processing facilities", or farms, would be required to register with the FDA and pay annual registration fees for program compliance, as well as other requirements including hazard evaluation, preventive hazard control, and copious record-keeping stipulations, regardless of the farm's size, organic certification, or already-existing safety guidelines.

Similar to H.R. 875, H.R 759 makes no differentiation between "food processing facilities", lumping everything from a small, certified-organic family produce farm to a large, conventional factory farm in its "one-size-fits-all" classification system. In other words, the same regulations placed on large agribusiness would be placed on farmers providing fresh vegetables at the local farmers market. There is also no differentiation in the bill between organic farms, which are already highly regulated and have extremely high standards, and their pesticide-ridden conventional counterparts.

Rather than logically evaluating the root causes of food contamination, which are almost always caused by filthy food processors not maintaining proper standards, these "food safety" bills seem to economically disparage family farms in favor of factory farms and transfer ever-more control over food to the FDA, an odious federal bureaucracy that is unable to enforce the food safety guidelines that are already established.

With the exception of H.R. 875, the food safety bills that have been proposed fail to identify and examine the real causes of food contamination and, instead, tack excessive burdens onto farmers, thus putting many small farms out of business. Even H.R. 875, while mentioning the importance of "identifying and evaluating the sources of potentially hazardous contamination," represents an enormous shift in power from the individual to the state, representing ominous implications for food freedom.

Since foods such as spinach, peppers, almonds, peanuts, and others for which there have been recent contamination outbreaks are not inherently dangerous, it is vital for any food safety legislation to seek to identify the root causes of contamination and deal with them accordingly. Whether it is the filthy animal feedlot up the road that has contaminated with salmonella the water used by the nearby spinach farm, or the improper cleaning of peanut-processing equipment by the industrial peanut processor, the contamination source is virtually never the farm itself, but some other link in the food processing chain. Yet H.R. 759 targets farms with more regulation, particularly disadvantaging small farms. Thus it is important to make Congress aware of the facts and to urge a redirection of food safety efforts towards the real culprits rather than the farmers.

Since H.R. 759 has been referred to, and remains in, the House Energy and Commerce committee, it is important to act now and en masse to oppose it and any food safety legislation that would harm organic and family farms, increase FDA power over the nation's food supply, and bolster Big Agribusiness by squelching competition with one-size-fits-all regulations aimed at putting out of business small farms.

Additionally, any true food safety legislation should require independent analysis into the root causes of food contamination rather than penalize the "food processors" (farms) with overbearing regulatory burdens while allowing the real perpetrators to continue their unacceptable practices.

Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, can be contacted at (202) 225-2927. Congress can also be contacted by visiting http://www.congress.org/congressorg... or by calling the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

The Cornucopia Institute also provides a sample letter that can be downloaded, modified, and sent to one's elected officials.

Now is the time to speak out against illegitimate "food safety" bills in order to protect access to clean, healthy, local food, not to mention the freedom to grow it, sell it, and buy it.

Sources:
Govtrack.us - H.R. 759
The Cornucopia Institute
Committee on Energy and Commerce
Congress.org

Lose your property for growing food?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=92002

GROUND CONTROL
Lose your property for growing food?
Big Brother legislation could mean prosecution, fines up to $1 million

Posted: March 16, 2009
8:56 pm Eastern

By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Some small farms and organic food growers could be placed under direct supervision of the federal government under new legislation making its way through Congress.

Food Safety Modernization Act

House Resolution 875, or the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009, was introduced by Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in February. DeLauro's husband, Stanley Greenburg, works for Monsanto – the world's leading producer of herbicides and genetically engineered seed.

DeLauro's act has 39 co-sponsors and was referred to the House Agriculture Committee on Feb. 4. It calls for the creation of a Food Safety Administration to allow the government to regulate food production at all levels – and even mandates property seizure, fines of up to $1 million per offense and criminal prosecution for producers, manufacturers and distributors who fail to comply with regulations.

Michael Olson, host of the Food Chain radio show and author of "Metro Farm," told WND the government should focus on regulating food production in countries such as China and Mexico rather than burdening small and organic farmers in the U.S. with overreaching regulations.

"We need somebody to watch over us when we're eating food that comes from thousands and thousands of miles away. We need some help there," he said. "But when food comes from our neighbors or from farmers who we know, we don't need all of those rules. If your neighbor sells you something that is bad and you get sick, you are going to get your hands on that farmer, and that will be the end of it. It regulates itself."

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The legislation would establish the Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services "to protect the public health by preventing food-borne illness, ensuring the safety of food, improving research on contaminants leading to food-borne illness, and improving security of food from intentional contamination, and for other purposes."

Federal regulators will be tasked with ensuring that food producers, processors and distributors – both large and small – prevent and minimize food safety hazards such as food-borne illnesses and contaminants such as bacteria, chemicals, natural toxins or manufactured toxicants, viruses, parasites, prions, physical hazards or other human pathogens.


Under the legislation's broad wording, slaughterhouses, seafood processing plants, establishments that process, store, hold or transport all categories of food products prior to delivery for retail sale, farms, ranches, orchards, vineyards, aquaculture facilities and confined animal-feeding operations would be subject to strict government regulation.

Government inspectors would be required to visit and examine food production facilities, including small farms, to ensure compliance. They would review food safety records and conduct surveillance of animals, plants, products or the environment.

"What the government will do is bring in industry experts to tell them how to manage all this stuff," Olson said. "It's industry that's telling government how to set these things up. What it always boils down to is who can afford to have the most influence over the government. It would be those companies that have sufficient economies of scale to be able to afford the influence – which is, of course, industrial agriculture."

Farms and food producers would be forced to submit copies of all records to federal inspectors upon request to determine whether food is contaminated, to ensure they are in compliance with food safety laws and to maintain government tracking records. Refusal to register, permit inspector access or testing of food or equipment would be prohibited.

"What is going to happen is that local agriculture will end up suffering through some onerous protocols designed for international agriculture that they simply don't need," Olson said. "Thus, it will be a way for industrial agriculture to manage local agriculture."

Under the act, every food producer must have a written food safety plan describing likely hazards and preventative controls they have implemented and must abide by "minimum standards related to fertilizer use, nutrients, hygiene, packaging, temperature controls, animal encroachment, and water."

"That opens a whole can of worms," Olson said. "I think that's where people are starting to freak out about losing organic agriculture. Who is going to decide what the minimum standards are for fertilization or anything else? The government is going to bring in big industry and say we are setting up these protocols, so what do you think we should do? Who is it going to bring in to ask? The government will bring in people who have economies of scale who have that kind of influence."

DeLauro's act calls for the Food Safety Administration to create a "national traceability system" to retrieve history, use and location of each food product through all stages of production, processing and distribution.

Olson believes the regulations could create unjustifiable financial hardships for small farmers and run them out of business.

"That is often the purpose of rules and regulations: to get rid of your competition," he said. "Only people who are very, very large can afford to comply. They can hire one person to do paperwork. There's a specialization of labor there, and when you are very small, you can't afford to do all of these things."

Olson said despite good intentions behind the legislation, this act could devastate small U.S. farms.

"Every time we pass a rule or a law or a regulation to make the world a better place, it seems like what we do is subsidize production offshore," he said. "We tell farmers they can no longer drive diesel tractors because they make bad smoke. Well, essentially what we're doing is giving China a subsidy to grow our crops for us, or Mexico or anyone else."

Section 304 of the Food Safety Modernization Act establishes a group of "experts and stakeholders from Federal, State, and local food safety and health agencies, the food industry, consumer organizations, and academia" to make recommendations for improving food-borne illness surveillance.

According to the act, "Any person that commits an act that violates the food safety law … may be assessed a civil penalty by the Administrator of not more than $1,000,000 for each such act."

Each violation and each separate day the producer is in defiance of the law would be considered a separate offense and an additional penalty. The act suggests federal administrators consider the gravity of the violation, the degree of responsibility and the size and type of business when determining penalties.

Criminal sanctions may be imposed if contaminated food causes serious illness or death, and offenders may face fines and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

"It's just frightening what can happen with good intentions," Olson said. "It's probably the most radical notions on the face of this Earth, but local agriculture doesn't need government because it takes care of itself."

Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act


Another "food safety" bill that has organic and small farmers worried is Senate Bill 425, or the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act, sponsored by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.

Brown's bill is backed by lobbyists for Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson. It was introduced in September and has been referred to the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee. Some say the legislation could also put small farmers out of business.

Like HR 875, the measure establishes a nationwide "traceability system" monitored by the Food and Drug Administration for all stages of manufacturing, processing, packaging and distribution of food. It would cost $40 million over three years.

"We must ensure that the federal government has the ability and authority to protect the public, given the global nature of the food supply," Brown said when he introduced the bill. He suggested the FDA and USDA have power to declare mandatory recalls.

The government would track food shipped in interstate commerce through a recordkeeping and audit system, a secure, online database or registered identification. Each farmer or producer would be required to maintain records regarding the purchase, sale and identification of their products.

A 13-member advisory committee of food safety and tracking technology experts, representatives of the food industry, consumer advocates and government officials would assist in implementing the traceability system.

The bill calls for the committee to establish a national database or registry operated by the Food and Drug Administration. It also proposes a electronic records database to identify sales of food and its ingredients "establishing that the food and its ingredients were grown, prepared, handled, manufactured, processed, distributed, shipped, warehoused, imported, and conveyed under conditions that ensure the safety of the food."

It states, "The records should include an electronic statement with the date of, and the names and addresses of all parties to, each prior sale, purchase, or trade, and any other information as appropriate."

If government inspectors find that a food item is not in compliance, they may force producers to cease distribution, recall the item or confiscate it.

"If the postal service can track a package from my office in Washington to my office in Cincinnati, we should be able to do the same for food products," Sen. Brown said in a Sept. 4, 2008, statement. "Families that are struggling with the high cost of groceries should not also have to worry about the safety of their food. This legislation gives the government the resources it needs to protect the public."


Recalls of contaminated food are usually voluntary; however, in his weekly radio address on March 15, President Obama announced he's forming a Food Safety Working Group to propose new laws and stop corruption of the nation's food.

The group will review, update and enforce food safety laws, which Obama said "have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt."

The president said outbreaks from contaminated foods, such as a recent salmonella outbreak among consumers of peanut products, have occurred more frequently in recent years due to outdated regulations, fewer inspectors, scaled back inspections and a lack of information sharing between government agencies.

"In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president but as a parent," Obama said. "No parent should have to worry that their child is going to get sick from their lunch just as no family should have to worry that the medicines they buy will cause them harm."

The blogosphere is buzzing with comments on the legislation, including the following:

*Obama and his cronies or his puppetmasters are trying to take total control – nationalize everything, disarm the populace, control food, etc. We are seeing the formation of a total police state.

*Well ... that's not very " green " of Obama. What's his real agenda?

*This is getting way out of hand! Isn't it enough the FDA already allows poisons in our foods?

*If you're starving, no number of guns will enable you to stay free. That's the whole idea behind this legislation. He who controls the food really makes the rules.

*The government is terrified of the tax loss. Imagine all the tax dollars lost if people actually grew their own vegetables! Imagine if people actually coordinated their efforts with family, friends and neighbors. People could be in no time eating for the price of their own effort. ... Oh the horror of it all! The last thing the government wants is for us to be self-sufficient.

*They want to make you dependent upon government. I say no way! already the government is giving away taxes from my great great grandchildren and now they want to take away my food, my semi-auto rifles, my right to alternative holistic medicine?

*We need a revolution, sheeple! Wake up! They want fascism ... can you not see that?

*The screening processes will make it very expensive for smaller farmers, where bigger agriculture corporations can foot the bill.

*If anything it just increases accountability, which is arguably a good thing. It pretty much says they'll only confiscate your property if there are questions of contamination and you don't comply with their inspections. I think the severity of this has been blown out of proportion by a lot of conjecture.

*Don't waste your time calling the criminals in D.C. and begging them to act like humans. This will end with a bloody revolt.

*The more I examine this (on the surface) seemingly innocuous bill the more I hate it. It is a coward's ploy to push out of business small farms and farmers markets without actually making them illegal because many will choose not to operate due to the compliance issue.