Food, Regulation, and Concentrated Power
Next time someone tells you that industry is ‘over regulated’, urge them to watch the 2008 movie ‘Food, Inc.’ If a cozy, swinging-door relationship between the regulators and the regulated sounds familiar, it is all there in the ag/food industry. Concentration of power in just a few large corporations? It is all there in the ag/food industry. Priority of profit over public health? All there in the ag/food industry. Government subsidies, regulatory loopholes? All there in the ag/food industry, just as in the fossil fuel industries and the banking industries.
From the movie website: Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.
