Very few people know what goes into the products we eat, but innocent consumers become acutely aware when irresponsible food production practices result in tragedy.
The system is highly productive, and North Americans are spending less on food than ever before. But at what cost?
The Squamish Climate Action Network (CAN) wants to illuminate locals on the reality of what people are eating with What's on Your Plate? - a film and discussion at the Adventure Centre over the next two Monday (May 10) and Monday May 17 at 7 p.m.
In Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry - an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and the environment.
"With the use of animation and compelling graphics, the filmmakers expose the highly mechanized, Orwellian underbelly that's been deliberately hidden from the American consumer," states the film's website.
An American mother's fight for safe food production following her two-year-old son's harrowing death of E. coli due to contaminated hamburger meat is just one of the stories documented in the Academy Award nominated film.
The subject matter is challenging, warns Squamish CAN co-ordinator Ana Santos.
"Watching this movie will not be a walk in the park," she said.
Though the companies try to maintain the myth that food still comes from farms with red barns and white picket fences, it is actually raised on massive "factory farms" and processed in mega industrial plants. The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them.
Tomatoes are bred to be shipped without bruising and to stay edible for months.
Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest, resulting in new strains of E. coli bacteria, which sickens roughly 73,000 Americans annually.
And because of the high proliferation of processed foods derived from corn, Americans are facing epidemic levels of diabetes among adults and alarming increases in obesity, especially among children.
There's hope, as farmers like Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley tells filmmakers how it can be done, but a handful of corporations have a stranglehold on the American food supply.
The film exposes a revolving door of executives from giant food corporations in and out of the U.S. government's regulatory agencies, such as the USDA and the FDA, resulting in a lack of oversight and illuminating how this dysfunctional political system often operates at the expense of the American consumer.
What's on Your Plate brings it all into local perspective on Monday (May 10) and Monday, May 17 at the Adventure Centre at 7 p.m.
