You Can Change the Nation

 Everyone with a dvd player should watch this movie: Food, Inc.  I bet most of you, like me, have never bothered to ask where your supermarket gets the food you eat.  I knew about slaughterhouses being gruesome, e.coli outbreaks occurring more frequently, and farms being responsible for pollution.  What I did not know was how severe and prevalent these issues have become.  Even worse, the FDA and USDA are no longer protecting the consumer from harmful poisons and poor nutrition.  In fact, they are working behind the scenes with multi-national corporations and Congress to not only promote cheap, harmful food, but are actively creating a veil to hide the reality from consumers.  Companies and individuals that attempt to fight them are shut down and silenced through lawsuits and impossible court fees, often times ending in their family and property being taken from them. 

But, as consumers, we are not powerless.  We can dictate the market by only buying foods that are organic from companies that support healthy and ethical farming practices.  We can support local meat, produce, and dairy farms, and spend money in local farmers markets.  We can rally together to support bills that will change how the food industry processes and packages the food we eat.  We can act to shut down facilities that regularly fail to pass pathogen tests.

All of these issues are DIRECTLY related to childhood obesity and the boom of childhood diseases.  Until we start changing our buying habits so that a bag of carrots costs less than a bag of potato chips, schools and daycares will continue to shovel shit into our children's mouths.  Low income families will not be able to buy that bag of carrots until middle class Americans flood the market with a demand for high quality, nutritious food.

Please do YOUR PART.  Watch the movie, and pass it along to others.  Change your buying habits.  Get involved locally. Go to this website to take part in changing our future, and our kid's future.


http://www.takepart.com/foodinc