I am on the Board of Ontrace – Ontario Agri-food Traceablity Corporation: an Ontario goverment funded initiated to find, develop, and deliver agri-food traceability solutions for Ontario (and other) businesses. http://www.ontraceagrifood.com/home.php)
Today, the notice about the pending release of Food, Inc, a movie about agri-food business in North America, hit my inbox from Brian Sterling, the CEO of OnTrace. The movie is expected to raise a lot of concern among food consumers. (see http://www.foodincmovie.com/ and the review of the film below.
The sadness of this story is not the practices that the film will portray but rather the disconnect that is shows between American (and Canadian and international) agri-food business leaders and their customers. Every food or animal activist can find some curmudgeon or greedy person or just plain insensitive cruel individual and their poor farming or food processing or poor treatment of animals to feature in films like this. Everyone in the food business has a responsibility to confront people like this and get them to clean up their act. My experience is that folks are often not prepared to confront such peers. That is a shame…
But what is even more distributing to me is that some food company executives seems to have forgotten that customers, with their concerns and their needs and their perceptions, are an even more important stakeholders in their business that investors and shareholders. Without customers there would be no food business. The fact that some many people, including Lynne and I, frequent farmers markets and other local sources is because we are treated like customers there, not just people with a wallet that needs emptying. The food industry seems to have forgotten this in its relentless purpose of profit, even when this has meant adding unproven additives to food in the search for self life and increased profit per unit of weight and even when it has meant not sharing a reasonable portion of total value produced along the agri-food value chain with primary producers.
In the long run consumers are not fools. They vote with their feet and their wallets more than they vote at the ballot box. People who make films like this are angry because they have a sense that they have been treated with contempt as consumers. They play to other consumers who more and more feel that the many of the leaders have the agri-food business have values that do not really consider fresh, wholesome, health supporting food as least as important, it not more so, than this year’s revenue and profits and personal bonuses. Today some, certainly not all, of the agri-food business executives I have dealt with, behave this way.
I often see the world as a place in which we have gotten deeply confused about basics. I don’t believe that a desire to return to the past solves tomorrow’s problems. So I don’t long for a world in which we all raise our own food, or keep chickens in our back yard, or have a personal relationship with a farmer who we visit every weekend to pick up this week’s food. I deeply enjoy the variety of produce that modern transportation and marketing methods allow me to eat. But I often wonder if the food industry as a whole would be a better industry if it were “not for profit” – still large, still modern, still efficient, but dedicated to meeting the needs of two primary stakeholders – workers in the food agri-value chain (including producers) and consumers. Somehow, like banking, executives in this business have lost track of these stakeholders in their dedication to the meeting the financial needs of firm owners and investors. I think that my wondering may be an over reaction, but it certainly points out the need to put in place governance practices that force executives to deliver a better balance between the interests of workers, consumers, owners, investors and themselves.
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New documentary ‘Food, Inc.’ offers troubling view of American food industry
Fri Jun 5, 2:47 PM
By Ann Levin, For The Associated Press
NEW YORK – The new documentary “Food, Inc.” begins with idyllic scenes of American farmland, panning from golden fields of hay to a solitary cowboy rounding up a herd of cattle. Then the camera zooms in on a grocery cart overflowing with packaged food and rolling down the aisles of a gaudily lit supermarket.
Eerie, horror movie-style music swells in the background. It’s meant to signal the audience that the pastoral fantasy of agrarian America on everything from packages of breakfast sausage to cereal boxes is not what it seems, that great danger lurks behind the cheery images of 1930s-era red barns and white picket fences.
Director Robert Kenner is bent on showing us a far grimmer reality. He tells of dust-choked poultry houses where chickens never see the light of day and are pumped so full of chemicals they produce more meat than their organs can support. Eventually they collapse under the weight of their abnormally large breasts and die before reaching the slaughterhouse.
He shows us industrial feed lots where cows are fattened on chemical-enhanced feed and forced to spend their days standing ankle-deep in manure.
Kenner relates the heart-wrenching story of Republican-turned-activist Barbara Kowalcyk, who prowls the halls of Congress with her mother to try to force lawmakers to enact food safety legislation that she believes could have saved the life of her 2 1/2-year-old son Kevin, who died of E. coli poisoning 12 days after eating contaminated hamburgers.
Kenner is hoping his film will raise awareness of the enormous price in health and safety that he says Americans pay to gorge themselves on the relatively cheap calories that stock supermarket shelves courtesy of a handful of multinational corporations.
Just as the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” helped galvanize the fight against global warming, Kenner and his partners want to spur legions of activists to rise up and take aim at lawmakers and government regulators they believe have been corrupted by lobbyists for agribusiness.
An alliance of trade associations that represent America’s meat and poultry producers have set up a website to counter virtually every claim in the documentary, from the contention that E. coli contamination could be reduced by feeding cattle grass instead of grain, to charges that U.S. federal inspection agencies are understaffed and ineffective, and foodborne illnesses are on the rise.
The food industry says the film has “an astonishing number of half-truths, errors and omissions” and that scrapping current production methods in favor of locally grown, seasonal organic food would result in a dramatic increase in food prices and fewer fruits and vegetables year-round.
Janet M. Riley, senior vice president at the American Meat Institute, says that contrary to the menacing image presented in the film, the industry – comprised of “ordinary, hardworking people” – provides “the safest, most affordable, most abundant food supply in the world.”
She also says it would be foolhardy to abandon modern food production methods during a global recession, when people are starving in parts of the world.
“Why would we want to turn the clock back to a less efficient way to produce food?” she says.
Kenner’s arguments will be familiar to readers of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” author Michael Pollan, whose numerous books and articles have decried the physical and even moral hazard of the industrial food system.
Pollan is featured in the film, as is “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser, who wrote the best-selling 2001 expose of the fast food industry that was later turned into a movie.
Pollan, who has criticized industrial agriculture for a decade, calls Kenner’s documentary “the most important and powerful film about our food system in a generation.”
He says the director has broken new ground with his reporting on such things as a new, high-tech system of meat processing that bathes beef filler in ammonia to kill harmful bacteria.
Even though alternative agriculture represents just a small part of the U.S. food industry, Pollan says he is “full of hope” about the future. He cites the booming demand for organic food and the growing popularity of farmers markets.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sales of organics have more than quintupled, increasing from US$3.6 billion in 1997 to US$21.1 billion in 2008.
Kenner, too, is optimistic, ending the film on an uplifting note. He sees a hopeful model in the fight against Big Tobacco, which also seemed invulnerable to attack by health and safety advocates – until it wasn’t.
Like Pollan, Kenner is heartened by what he’s seen so far from the Obama administration.
Pollan, in particular, applauded Michelle Obama’s decision to plant an organic garden on the South Lawn of the White House. Kenner says the president won’t be able to tackle his other priorities of reforming health care and halting global warming without changing the way Americans produce and consume food.
So what do Kenner and Pollan believe the average person should do if they want to shun the agribusiness model?
Says Kenner: “Go to a farmers market whenever you can. Eat a little less meat. Read labels when you go into a store. Shop the outer rows of the supermarket. Cook at home. Buy less processed food.”
And Pollan? All of that, and also this: “Get involved in your school lunch program. Get junk food out of the whole school. Sign up with a listserv for one of the many groups that’s tracking this. Your congressman/woman needs to hear from you.”
Still, Lowell Catlett, dean of the School of Agriculture at New Mexico State University, says U.S. consumers actually have a pretty good deal. Before World War II, a quarter of a million Americans died every year from a combination of unsanitary food and water and inadequate sewage facilities. “Overall, we have a safer food system,” he said.
The film opens June 12 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with wider distribution beginning June 19.
Tags: consumer interest, executive motivation, food, food filn, food industry, food safety, stakeholder interests, worker interest
