Food Inc.

Saturday morning, Joy and I watched one of our neighbor’s …er… let’s say ‘free range’ hens lay an egg on top of a garden shed we look down on from our kitchen window.

In the evening, we watched a Montreal Canadiens hockey game, which is part of my penance for moving her from Canada to the U.S. for marital purposes. Joy often retires early on Saturday, especially if her team has won. After she goes to bed, I watch action-adventure movies that she can't stomach. She can’t watch violence of any kind… hmm, check that… she can’t watch violence that doesn’t take place on frozen water.

So this night I watched a Netflixed- documentary called “Food, Inc.” All joking aside, I knew there was no way Joy could watch the sections involving slaughterhouses and meat packing. I've read “Fast Food Nation” and Michael Pollan and knew what to expect, and I still found this film disturbing.

The scenes of the factory chicken farms, in which chickens don’t even see daylight, stood in contrast to our neighbor’s wacky hen who laid her egg in the open air.

But what really affected me about the documentary were the scenes about Monsanto and how their high-powered attorneys and strong-armed investigators harassed and intimidated a 75 year-old seed cleaner named Moe Parr. Moe had one of the last remaining seed cleaning machines that allowed farmers to save and re-plant seeds from their own crops - a practice as old as farming itself.

The extent to which Monsanto has wielded wealth, power and influence in the highest branches of our government (and worse) Supreme Court just sickened me. To my surprise, I found myself crying by the end of the film. It wasn’t so much out of sadness, but out of sheer outrage and frustration at how money and power can lead to such devastation of our planet’s eco-system.

This documentary is important. It may not make you cry, but it’s guaranteed to enrage you. It will also support everything that my wife has been saying in this blog. You can’t fight Monsanto and Archer Daniels Midland by yourself, but you can vote with your food purchases, and you can educate yourself, and you can add one more voice of opposition to the insanity and destructiveness of our corporately-run food supply system.

Screw them, I say. Let us continue to lay eggs and plant seeds and place the laws of nature above the laws of man.