Food, Inc.
Right after I stocked my freezer with meat from many beasts, I watched Food, Inc..
Hmmm.
I listened to The Jungle years ago on a long drive home from college. Reading about the horrors of slaughterhouses doesn't have the same effect as listening to it, or watching it. I gave up ground meat for almost five years after The Jungle.
Food, Inc. has a much broader scope, and what is resonating with me now is the food that our food eats. We feed cows, chickens, and now fish an unnatural diet of corn and grains to fatten them up, then dose them with antibiotics and medicine to keep them healthy enough to slaughter. It's not a far leap to consider the similarities in our own diet.
There aren't a whole lot of free range, grass fed, uncured meat options at the grocery store down the street. I live near a Whole Foods, which has more options, though it takes some sifting to figure out which healthy words on the packages are worth purchasing. But it is expensive.
When I consider how much meat I'll be eating this year, it makes me shudder to picture those cows covered in muck swinging from a hook and slamming into a wall. It also makes me cringe to think of the increased percentage of my income that will go to feeding my face. I have a freezer full of conventional chicken, bacon, steak. What to do?
I don't think I can afford to buy only the fancy meat at Whole Foods for the whole year, but I don't want to go to all this effort to eliminate grains from my diet, only to feast daily on grain-fed beasts.
The Polyface Farms has a buying club with a distribution location not too far from my house. It isn't that convenient, but it sure beats trying to tackle a deer in Rock Creek park. Immediately after watching Food, Inc., I emailed Polyface asking for a price sheet and more information about the buying clubs. I'm still waiting to hear back, but have high hopes that this will be a good solution.
Has anyone else seen this movie? What did you think?
As an aside: There was a part in the movie that confused me. In a chicken plant, there was a stream of little yellow cheeping chicks being carried along a conveyor belt. A person with gloves on would scoop up a chick, tap it's head against a metal plate and toss the zapped chick (dead, I presume) onto another belt of other zapped chicks. What's the purpose of that? Is there a market for chicks? I would think they would ship those suckers out to chicken houses to fatten up for food or egg laying. Thoughts?