The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years
than in the previous 10,000.
But the image that's used to sell the food,
it is still the imagery of agrarian America.
You go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers,
the picket fence, the silo,
the '30s farmhouse and the green grass.
It's the spinning of this pastoral fantasy.
The modern American supermarket
has on average 47,000 products.
There are no seasons in the American supermarket.
Now there are tomatoes all year round,
grown halfway around the world, picked when it was green,
and ripened with ethylene gas.
Although it looks like a tomato,
it's kind of a notional tomato.
I mean, it's the idea of a tomato.
In the meat aisle, there are no bones anymore.
There is this deliberate veil,
this curtain, that's dropped between us
and where our food is coming from.
The industry doesn't want you to know the truth
about what you're eating,
because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.
If you follow the food chain back
from those shrink-wrapped packages of meat,
you find a very different reality.
The reality is a factory.
It's not a farm. It's a factory.
That meat is being processed
by huge multinational corporations
that have very little to do with ranches and farmers.
Now our food is coming from enormous assembly lines
where the animals and the workers are being abused.
And the food has become much more dangerous
in ways that are being deliberately hidden from us.
You've got a small group of multinational corporations
who control the entire food system.
From seed to the supermarket,
they're gaining control of food.
This isn't just about what we're eating.
This is about what we're allowed to say,
what we're allowed to know.
It's not just our health that's at risk.
The companies don't want farmers talking.
They don't want this story told.
How about a nice chicken club sandwich made with fresh cooked chicken?
You know, that's a nice idea,
but I think what I'd really like
- is a burger. - All right.
My favorite meal to this day
remains a hamburger and french fries.
I had no idea that a handful of companies
had changed what we eat and how we make our food.
I've been eating this food all my life
without having any idea where it comes from,
any idea how powerful this industry is.
And it was the idea
of this world deliberately hidden from us.
I think that's one of the reasons why
I became an investigative reporter,
was to take the veil-- lift the veil away
from important subjects that are being hidden.
The whole industrial food system
really began with fast food.
In the 1930s,
a new form of restaurant arose
and it was called the drive-in.
The McDonald brothers had a very successful drive-in,
but they decided to cut costs and simplify.
So they fired all their carhops,
they got rid of most of the things on the menu
and they created a revolutionary idea
to how to run a restaurant.
They basically brought the factory system
to the back of the restaurant kitchen.
They trained each worker to just do one thing
again and again and again.
By having workers who only had to do one thing,
they could pay them a low wage
and it was very easy to find someone to replace them.
It was inexpensive food, it tasted good
and this McDonald's fast food restaurant
was a huge huge success.
That mentality of uniformity,
conformity and cheapness
applied widely and on a large scale
has all kinds of unintended consequences.
When McDonald's is the largest purchaser
of ground beef in the United States
and they want their hamburgers
to taste, everywhere, exactly the same,
they change how ground beef is produced.
The McDonald's corporation
is the largest purchaser of potatoes
and one of the largest purchasers of pork,
chicken, tomatoes, lettuce, even apples.
These big big fast food chains
want big suppliers.
And now there are essentially a handful of companies
controlling our food system.
In the 1970s, the top five beef-packers
controlled only about 25% of the market.
Today, the top four
control more than 80% of the market.
You see the same thing happening now in pork.
Even if you don't eat at a fast food restaurant,
you're now eating meat that's being produced
by this system.
You look at the labels
and you see Farmer this, Farmer that--
it's really just three or four companies
that are controlling the meat.
We've never had food companies this big
and this powerful in our history.
Tyson, for example,
is the biggest meat-packing company in the history of the world.
The industry changed the entire way that chicken are raised.
Birds are now raised and slaughtered
in half the time they were 50 years ago,
but now they're twice as big.
People like to eat white meat,
so they redesigned the chicken
to have large breasts.
They not only changed the chicken,
they changed the farmer.
Today, chicken farmers no longer control their birds.
A company like Tyson
owns the birds from the day they're dropped off
until the day that they're slaughtered.
Let me go to the top.
- This is the Chicken-- - National Chicken Council.
The chicken industry has really set a model
for the integration of production, processing
and marketing of the products
that other industries are now following
because they see that we have achieved tremendous economies.
In a way, we're not producing chickens;
we're producing food.
It's all highly mechanized.
So all the birds coming off those farms
have to be almost exactly the same size.
What the system of intensive production accomplishes
is to produce a lot of food
on a small amount of land
at a very affordable price.
Now somebody explain to me what's wrong with that.
Smells like money to me.
16 chicken houses sit here.
And Chuck's son has four over the top of this hill.
The chicken industry came in here
and it's helped this whole community out.
Here's my chicken houses here.
I have about 300,000 chickens.
What do you want?
We have a contract with Tyson.
They've been growing chickens for many many years.
And it's all a science. They got it figured out.
If you can grow a chicken in 49 days,
why would you want one you gotta grow in three months?
More money in your pocket.
These chickens never see sunlight.
They're pretty much in the dark all the time.
So you think they just want to keep us out?
I don't know.
If I knew, I'd tell you.
It would be nice if y'all could see what we really do,
but, you know, as far as y'all going in,
That's .. we can't let you do that.
I understand why farmers don't want to talk--
because the company can do what it wants to do
as far as pay goes since they control everything.
Umm .. but it's just gotten to the point
that it's not right what's going on
and I've just made up my mind.
I'm gonna say what I have to say.
I understand why others don't want to do it.
And I'm just to a point
that it doesn't matter anymore.
Something has to be said.
It is nasty in here.
There's dust flying everywhere.
There's feces everywhere.
This isn't farming.
This is just mass production,
like an assembly line in a factory.
When they grow from a chick
and in seven weeks you've got a five-and-a-half- pound chicken,
their bones and their internal organs
can't keep up with the rapid growth.
A lot of these chickens here, they can take a few steps
and then they plop down. It's because they can't
keep up all the weight that they're carrying.
That's normal.
There's antibiotics that's put into the feed
and of course that passes through the chicken.
The bacteria builds up a resistance,
so antibiotics aren't working anymore.
I have become allergic to all antibiotics
and can't take 'em.
When it's dark inside the houses,
the chickens lay down. It's less resistance
when they're being caught.
Traditionally, it's been African-American men.
Now we're seeing more and more Latino catchers--
undocumented workers.
From their point of view, they don't have any rights
and they're just not gonna complain.
The companies like these kind of workers.
It doesn't matter if the chickens get sick.
All of the chickens will go to the plant
for processing.
The companies keep the farmers under their thumb
because of the debt that the farmers have.
To build one poultry house
is anywhere from $280,000 to $300,000 per house.
And once you make your initial investment,
the companies constantly come back
with demands of upgrades
for new equipment,
and the grower has no choice.
They have to do it
or you're threatened with loss of a contract.
This is how they keep the farmers under control.
It's how they keep them spending money,
going to the bank and borrowing more money.
Umm ..and the debt just keeps building.
To have no say in your business,
it's degrading.
It's like being a slave to the company.
The idea that you would need to write a book
telling people where their food came from
is just a sign of how far removed we've become.
It seems to me that we're entitled to know about our food--
"Who owns it? How are they making it?
Can I have a look in the kitchen?"
When I wanted to understand the industrial food system,
what I set about doing was very simple.
I wanted to trace the source of my food.
When you go through the supermarket,
what looks like this cornucopia of variety and choice is not.
There is an illusion of diversity.
There are only a few companies involved
and there're only a few crops involved.
What really surprised me most
as I followed that food back to its source,
I kept ending up in the same place,
and that was a cornfield in Iowa.
So much of our industrial food
turns out to be clever rearrangements of corn.
Corn has conquered the world in a lot of ways.
It is a remarkable plant.
100 years ago, a farmer in America
could grow maybe 20 bushels of corn on an acre.
Today, 200 bushels is no problem.
That's an astonishing achievement
for which breeders deserve credit,
for which fertilizer makers deserve credit,
for which pesticide makers all deserve credit.
In the United States today,
30% of our land base is being planted to corn.
That's largely driven by government policy,
government policy that, in effect,
allows us to produce corn below the cost of production.
The truth of the matter is we're paid to overproduce,
and it was caused by
these large multinational interests.
The reason our government's promoting corn--
the Cargills, the ADMs, Tyson, Smithfield--
they have an interest in purchasing corn below the cost of production.
They use that interest and that extensive amount of money they have
to lobby Congress to give us the kind of farm bills we now have.
A "farm bill,"
which should really be called a "food bill,"
codifies the rules of the entire food economy.
Farm policy is always focused on these commodity crops
because you can store them.
We encourage farmers to grow as much corn as they can grow,
to get big, to consolidate.
We subsidize farmers by the bushel.
We produced a lot of corn
and they came up with uses for it.
We are now engineering our foods.
We know where to turn to for certain traits
like mouth feel and flavor.
And we bring all of these pieces together
and engineer new foods
that don't stale in the refrigerator,
don't develop rancidity.
Of course the biggest advance in recent years
was high-fructose corn syrup.
You know, I would venture to guess
if you go and look on the supermarket shelf,
I'll bet you 90% of them
would contain either a corn or soybean ingredient,
and most of the time will contain both.
Corn is the great raw material.
You get that big fat kernel of starch
and you can break that down and reassemble it.
You can make high-fructose corn syrup.
You can make maltodextrin
and diglycerides and xanthan gum
and ascorbic acid.
All those obscure ingredients on the processed food--
it's remarkable how many of them can be made from corn.
Plus, you can feed it to animals.
Corn is the main component in feed ingredients
whether it's chicken, hogs, cattle-- you name it.
Increasingly, we're feeding the corn to the fish
whether we're eating the tilapia or the farmed salmon.
We're teaching fish how to eat corn.
The fact that we had so much cheap corn
really allowed us to drive down the price of meat.
I mean, the average American is eating over 200 lbs
of meat per person per year.
That wouldn't be possible
had we not fed them this diet of cheap grain.
Since you're selling corn at below the price of production,
the feedlot operator can buy corn
at a fraction of what it costs to grow,
so that all the animals are sucked off
of all the farms in the Midwest.
There is a spiderweb
of roads and train tracks
all around the country moving corn
from where it's being grown to these CAFOs.
Cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn.
They're designed by evolution to eat grass.
And the only reason we feed them corn
is because corn is really cheap
and corn makes them fat quickly.
Where are you putting your hand?
I'm actually inside the rumen--
that first compartment of the stomach.
And it's--
it's not--
it's kind of hard to see.
You can see the liquid part here.
Wow.
- Does that hurt the cow? - No.
There's microorganisms--
bacteria in the rumen, millions of 'em.
The animals evolved
on consuming grass.
There's some research that indicates
that a high-corn diet results in
E. coli that are acid-resistant.
And these would be the more harmful E. coli.
So you feed corn to cattle
and E. coli, which is a very common bug, evolves,
a certain mutation occurs
and a strain called the "E. coli 0157:h7"
appears on the world stage.
And it's a product of the diet we're feeding cattle on feedlots
and it's a product of feedlot life.
The animals stand ankle deep
in their manure all day long.
So if one cow has it,
the other cows will get it.
When they get to the slaughterhouse,
their hides are caked with manure.
And if the slaughterhouse is slaughtering
400 animals an hour,
how do you keep that manure
from getting onto those carcasses?
And that's how the manure gets in the meat.
And now this thing that wasn't in the world
is in the food system.
A fast-food nightmare may be getting worse.
A two-year-old child died today in Seattle.
And the killer? Tainted meat from Jack In The Box hamburgers.
A nationwide recall today
for more than 140 tons of ground beef.
A half a million pounds of ground beef--
Today, nationwide recalls of Con Agra ground beef.
E. coli isn't just in ground beef now--
it's been found in spinach, apple juice--
and this is really because of the runoff from our factory farms.
90 confirmed cases of E. coli poisoning.
Central to it all-- raw, bagged spinach.
This is the 20th E. coli outbreak with leafy greens
in just the last decade.
For years during the Bush administration,
the chief of staff at the USDA
was the former chief lobbyist
to the beef industry in Washington;
the head of the F.D.A. was the former executive vice president
of the National Food Processors Association.
These regulatory agencies
are being controlled by the very companies
that they're supposed to be scrutinizing.
ConAgra, which recently recalled peanut butter
contaminated with salmonella,
was aware of problems in its plant two years ago.
There's always been food poisoning.
As more and more technology
is being applied to the production of food,
you would think it would be getting safer,
not more contaminated.
But the processing plants have gotten bigger and bigger.
it's just perfect for taking bad pathogens
and spreading them far and wide.
The recall of frozen hamburger now includes
22 million pounds.
Enough meat to make a fast-food hamburger
for every adult in America is being recalled.
In the 1970s, there were literally thousands
of slaughterhouses in the United States.
Today we have 13 slaughterhouses
that process the majority of beef
that is sold in the United States.
The hamburger of today,
it has pieces of thousands of different cattle
ground up in that one hamburger patty.
The odds increase exponentially that one of those animals
was carrying a dangerous pathogen.
It's remarkable how toothless
our regulatory agencies are when you look closely at it,
and that's how the industry wants it.
This is the USDA building up here.
Did Josh say how much time he thought we'd get?
- Five minutes. - Five minutes.
Well, maybe as much as 15. Got to be on time for that meeting.
- It starts a 4:00. - Okay.
So if I start going like that
- or start shuffling papers, it's time. - I know, it's time.
Thank you! Thank you.
I'm a registered Republican.
I've always been fairly conservative.
I never thought I would be doing this
and I certainly never thought I would be
working so closely with my mom.
- We go this way? Okay. - Yes, we go this way.
Made a mistake-- I think that's the way we want to go.
My mom and I, our relationship has
taken on a whole new dimension.
2421? 2421.
Here we are.
- Hi. - Hello.
- How are you? - I'm Pat.
- Hi, Pat. - Barb Kowalcyk.
- Hi, Barb. - After the first big push
to establish food standards, people just got complacent.
We reduced funding for the FDA.
We've relied increasingly
on self-policing for all of these industries.
And now we just have, really,
lost our system.
You're really one of the champions on the hill
for food safety and it's a very important cause.
It's very personal to me and my family.
Our food safety advocacy work started six years ago
when my two-and- a-half-year-old son Kevin
was stricken with E. coli 0157:h7
and went from being a perfectly healthy
beautiful little boy--
and I have a small picture with me today
that was taken two weeks before he got sick.
He went from that to being dead in 12 days.
In July 2001,
our family took a vacation.
Had we known what was in store for us,
we would have never gone home.
We ended up eating three hamburgers before he got sick.
We started to see blood in Kevin's diarrhea,
so we took him to the emergency room.
And they said, "We've gotten
the culture back from Kevin's stool,
and he has hemorrhagic E. coli."
They came in and informed us
that Kevin's kidneys were starting to fail.
Kevin received his first dialysis treatment.
He was not allowed to really drink water.
We had these little sponges
and we were allowed to dip that into a cup of water
and then give him that.
He bit the head off of one of them.
You've never seen someone beg.
He begged for water. It was all he could talk about.
They wouldn't let anybody bring any beverage into the room
because-- I mean, it was all he would talk about,
was... water.
I don't know if he knew what was happening to him...
and I hope-- I don't know.
To watch this beautiful child go
from being perfectly healthy to dead in 12 days--
it was just unbelievable
that this could happen from eating food.
What was kind of adding more insult to injury--
it took us almost two or three years
and hiring a private attorney
to actually find out that we matched a meat recall.
On August 1st, my son was already in the hospital.
They did an E. coli test at the plant that was positive.
They didn't end up recalling that meat
until August 27th,
16 days after he died.
If we have some more hearings-- which I'm sure we will--
I'd love to have you come and testify.
- Keep fighting. - Thank you. You too.
You never get over the death of your child.
You find a new normal.
- This way? - Yes.
- We're going this way? - Mm-hmm.
We put faith in our government
to protect us,
and we're not being protected
at a most basic level.
In 1998, the USDA implemented microbial testing
for salmonella and E. coli 0157:h7.
The idea was that if a plant repeatedly failed these tests,
that the USDA would shut the plant down
because they obviously had an ongoing contamination problem.
The meat and poultry associations
immediately took the USDA to court.
The courts basically said
the USDA didn't have the authority
to shut down the plants.
What it meant was that
you could have a pound of meat or poultry products
that is a petri dish of salmonella
and the USDA really can't do anything about it.
A new law was introduced in direct response
and this law became known as Kevin's Law.
It seems like such a clear-cut, common sense type thing.
- How are things going? - Fine fine.
We've been working for six years
and it still hasn't passed.
I sense that there may be
an opportunity-- an enhanced opportunity--
to get this signed into law this time.
I think that from the standpoint of the consumer,
a lot of people would support the idea
of paying a little more if they could be guaranteed
a higher standard of safety.
- Yeah. - But I also know
that there are other players
- in the food production chain... - We know.
...that tend to worry about that,
because it's gonna be seen as an add-on to their costs.
I think the advantage here is--
Sometimes it does feel like
industry was more protected than my son.
That's what motivated me to become an advocate.
In the past year alone, there have been
a multitude of food-borne illness outbreaks
which have resulted in significant losses.
Clearly our current approach
to food oversight and protection
is not meeting the needs of American families.
It's really hard for me to tell Kevin's story.
But the only way I'm going to be able
to prevent it from happening to other people
is to go out there and speak about it.
Yeah.
Six are elementary school students, one is a sibling,
and there's another one in another county
in Kentucky, so...
It will be seven years
since my son died.
All I wanted the company to do
was say "We're sorry.
We produced this defective product
that killed your child, and this is what
we're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again."
That's all we wanted,
and they couldn't give us that.
The industrial food system is always looking
for greater efficiency, but each new step in efficiency
leads to problems.
If you take feedlot cattle off of their corn diet,
give them grass for five days,
they will shed 80% of the E. coli in their gut.
But of course that's not what the industry does.
The industry's approach is--
when it has a systematic problem like that--
is not to go back and see what's wrong with the system,
it's to come up some high-tech fixes that allow the system to survive.
The 5x5 product surge tank--
low level. Low level.
This is our operations center.
We control all of our plants from here.
Where's Chicago? Here's Chicago,
Georgia, Utah, Kansas,
Nebraska, Texas, L.A., Ohio.
We control all levels of the gearboxes,
the speed of motors--
we can change those all from here.
We built something that--
from a food-safety standpoint,
we think we're ahead of everybody.
We think we can lessen the incidents
of E. coli 0157:h7.
But I just started working with ammonia
and ammonia hydroxide.
Ammonia kills bacteria,
so it became a processing tool.
I'm really a mechanic.
That's really what I am.
We design our own machinery.
This is our finished product.
Is your meat in most of the hamburgers in the country?
70%.
In five years, we think we'll be in 100%.
We do have some competitors.
I think we're gonna beat them.
Again, it's a marriage
of science and technology.
I want dollar meal--
- five rodeo cheeseburgers... - Five rodeos. Okay.
...two chicken sandwich.
- Anything else? - Two small drinks,
and give me a large Dr. Pepper.
- $11.48. - Thank you.
First window. Thank you.
We didn't even think about healthy eating
because we used to think everything was healthy.
- Here you go. - Thank you.
- Have a nice day. - You too. Thank you very much.
Now that I know that the food is
really unhealthy for us,
I feel guilty giving it to my kids.
But we don't have time to cook because we leave at 6:00.
We don't get home until 9:00, 10:00 at night.
When you have only a dollar to spend
and you have two kids to feed,
either you go to the market
and try to find something that's cheap
or just go straight through a drive-thru
and get two small hamburgers for them
and "Okay, here. Eat them."
This is what's gonna fill her up,
not that one single item at the market.
Look at the broccoli.
It's too expensive, man.
- What do you want to eat then? - Mama.
First check to see how many are there for a pound.
- Uh, we're not getting it. - Why not?
You'd only get two or three.
- No. Come on. - Aww!
We can find candy that's cheaper.
We can find chips that are cheaper.
The sodas are really cheap.
Sometimes you look at a vegetable and say
"Okay, we can get two hamburgers over here
for the same amount of price."
Why is it that you can buy
a double-cheeseburger at McDonald's for 99¢,
and you can't even get a head of broccoli for 99¢?
- You want the small one? - We've skewed our food system
to the bad calories
and it's not an accident.
I mean, the reasons that those calories are cheaper is
because those are the ones we're heavily subsidizing.
And this is directly tied to the kind of agriculture
that we're practicing
and the kind of farm policies we have.
All those snack-food calories are
the ones that come from the commodity crops--
from the wheat, from the corn
and from the soybeans.
By making those calories really cheap,
that's one of the reasons that the biggest predictor
of obesity is income level.
Over the course of human history,
we were struggling to make sure we had
enough food and enough calories
for a sizable percentage of the human race.
Now the problem is too many calories.
The industry blames obesity
on a crisis of personal responsibility.
But when you're engineering foods
you are pressing our evolutionary buttons.
The fact is we're hardwired
to go for three tastes--
salt, fat and sugar.
These things are very rare in nature
Now sugar is available 24/7
in tremendous quantities.
We're eating hundreds of pounds of the stuff a year.
This diet of high-fructose corn syrup
and refined carbohydrates
leads to these spikes of insulin
and, gradually, a wearing down of the system
by which our body metabolizes sugar.
My husband's diabetic.
One of my main concerns is
he could lose his sight.
He does get into-- sometimes he's shaking,
so I'm afraid that he's gonna start not being able to drive,
'cause that's what he does for a profession.
We have to consider his medicine.
What is it, $70?
50 pills costs me about $130.
But he's on two different types of pills.
$100-and-something for one pill
and then $100- and-something for another.
That takes a lot of our income away.
We're really tight from either
paying for his medicine to be healthy
or buying vegetables to be healthy.
So which one should we do?
It's hard to see my dad suffer with diabetes
and stuff like that.
And it's really sad to see that my sister might have it.
There's something that's going on
in the way that we live our lives,
where we play, where we buy our food
and the types of food that we're able to buy
that is causing this epidemic.
It's not just our community.
It's not just Baldwin Park. It's everywhere.
How many of us know one person
in our family with diabetes?
How about two?
Three? Keep your hand--
It used to be that type 2 diabetes
only affected adults.
And now it's affecting children at epidemic proportions.
Everything we've done
in modern industrial agriculture
is to grow it faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper.
Nobody's thinking about E. coli,
type 2 diabetes and the ecological health
of the whole system.
We're outsourcing
autonomous farmer decision making--
we're outsourcing that to corporate boardrooms
in big cities 1,000 miles away
where people make decisions and don't live
with the consequences of those decisions.
Everything is grass based.
You know, they don't eat corn, dead cows
or chicken manure like they feed right here in the valley--
or dead chickens.
They actually eat grass, forage--
you know, clover, grass, herbs.
They're herbivores.
If they were eating corn,
you're gonna have to harvest that corn, transport that corn,
then you're gonna have to haul all that manure somewhere
that comes out the back end.
Here... it's--
there-- there is the whole thing.
I mean the cow is-- she's fertilizing.
She's mowing. We don't have to spread any manure.
We don't have to harvest it-- she's harvesting it.
It's all real time-- real solar dollars.
The industrial food system
gradually became so noisy, smelly,
not a person-friendly place,
that the people who operate those plants
don't want anybody to go there,
because then people would see the ugly truth.
When that occurred,
then we lost all the integrity
and all the accountability in the food system.
If we put glass walls
on all the megaprocessing facilities,
we would have a different food system in this country.
We have allowed ourselves
to become so disconnected and ignorant
about something that is as intimate...
...as the food that we eat.
What a difference this is to be out here
in the fresh air, sunshine,
birds singing in the trees, you know?
But you see, according to the U.S.D.A,
this is unsanitary
because it's open to the air.
They tried to close us down.
One of the biggest showdowns we had was
when they tried to close us down
because this was unsanitary.
Can you imagine?
So we had them cultured at a local microbiology lab.
Ours averaged 133 C.F.U.
and the ones from the store
averaged 3600.
Of course, those have been through 40 trillion baths.
Ours haven't seen any chlorine.
A lot of people wonder "Is this real?
I mean, can you really feed the world?"
That whole thing is such a specious argument
because, yes,
we're every bit as efficient,
especially if you plug in
all of the inefficiencies of the industrial system.
I've had people come up at farmer's markets
and say "What? $3 a dozen for eggs?"
And they're drinking a 75¢ can of soda.
Hey, pig. Hey, piggles.
Hey, pigs.
I'm always struck by how successful we have been
at hitting the bull's-eye of the wrong target.
I mean we have learned-- for example,
in cattle we have learned how to--
how to plant,
fertilize and harvest corn
using global positioning satellite technology,
and nobody sits back and asks
"But should we be feeding cows corn?"
We've become a culture of technicians.
We're all into--
we're all into the how of it
and nobody's stepping back
and saying "But why?"
I mean, a culture that just views a pig
as a pile of protoplasmic inanimate structure
to be manipulated by whatever creative design
that humans can foist on that critter
will probably view
individuals within its community
and other cultures in the community of nations
with the same type of disdain,
disrespect
and controlling-type mentality.
The town where the plant is located
is a small town called Tar Heel
in the middle of a very economically-depressed area.
Smithfield has mastered
the art of picking and choosing
a workforce that they can exploit,
initially from the local workforce--
the poor whites, the poor black.
They went through that workforce very quickly.
Now they have to bus their workers
all the way from Dentsville, South Carolina,
to Clinton, North Carolina.
You have to draw a circle 100 miles in diameter,
and that's where all of your workers are coming from.
They have the same mentality towards workers
as they do towards the hogs.
You know, the hog, they don't really have to worry about their comfort
because they're temporary. They're gonna be killed.
And they have the same viewpoint to the worker.
You're not worried about the longevity of the worker
because, to them, everything has an end.
When you've got 2000 hogs an hour going through
employees, because they're handling these guts so much,
they get infections in their fingernails and all.
All their fingernails separate from their fingers.
You're covered with blood, feces, urine.
It's easy to get hurt down there.
You're doing that same movement
for that same piece of the hog
and it's nonstop, you know.
Basically you're treated as a human machine.
You get people that can't afford
to leave from out there, and Smithfield knows this.
And that's what they hold over you.
100 years ago
when Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle"
there was a beef trust that wielded enormous power.
Immigrants from Eastern Europe were being abused
in the absence of any kind of government regulation
There were horrible disfiguring injuries
and even deaths.
Things got better. They slowly got better.
Teddy Roosevelt took on the beef trust.
Labor unions slowly organized meatpacking workers
and turned it into one of the best industrial jobs
in the United States.
By the 1950s to be a meatpacking worker
was like being an auto worker
who has a good wage, good benefits, pension.
And then what happened?
Well, the meat-packing companies got bigger
in order to serve the needs of the fast-food industry,
which was its biggest customer.
Some of the meat-packing companies like IBP
borrowed the same sort of labor practices
from the fast food industry--
cutting wages, making sure there were no unions,
speeding up production,
and having the worker do the same task
again and again and again.
And meat-packing is now
one of the most dangerous jobs in the United States.
The meat-packing industry also recruited
a new set of immigrants-- illegal immigrants
and recent immigrants from Mexico.
Many of the illegal immigrants coming to America
were corn farmers in Mexico.
NAFTA led to a flooding of the Mexican market
with cheap American corn.
It's put more than a million and a half Mexican farmers out of work.
They couldn't compete with this cheap corn coming from America.
So what happens to those million and a half Mexican farmers?
Meat packers like IBP,
National Beef and Monfort
began actively recruiting in Mexico.
Companies advertised on the radio
and in newspapers.
IBP set up a bus service
in Mexico to bring workers into the United States.
For years the government turned a blind eye
to the recruitment of immigrants
by the meat-packing industry.
But now, when there's an anti-immigrant movement,
they're cracking down all of a sudden,
but they're not cracking down on these companies.
The government's cracking down on the workers.
Immigration agents are arresting Smithfield workers
at this trailer park.
This is an agreement
between Smithfield and Immigrations authorities.
They get rid of 15 workers per day,
but you don't see any massive raids.
That way it doesn't affect the production line.
- Sir, we are trying-- - She asked me a question.
She is asking us questions, not you.
I don't see anybody arresting no Smithfield managers.
Nobody in the plant that had anything to do
with the fact that those workers were hired
is being arrested.
What we see today is workers
who were producing for this company and working hard--
those are the people who get arrested.
We want to pay the cheapest price for our food.
We don't understand that that comes at a price.
These workers, they've been here for 10, 15 years
processing your bacon, your holiday ham
and now they're getting picked up like they're criminals.
And these companies are making billions of dollars.
Is cheapness everything that there is?
Who wants to buy the cheapest car?
We're willing to subsidize
the food system to create the "mystique"
of cheap food,
when actually it's very expensive food
when you add up the environmental costs
societal costs, health costs.
The industrial food is not honest food.
It's not priced honestly. It's not produced honestly.
It's not processed honestly.
There's nothing honest about that food.
I can't think of a better use for a Smithfield box.
It was about a five-hour drive
maybe 300, 400 miles.
So yeah.
It's worth it.
I have no desire to scale up or get bigger.
My desire is to produce the best food in the world
and heal.
And if in doing so
more people come to our corner and want stuff,
then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need
without compromising the integrity.
That-- that's where I am.
I have absolutely no desire
to be at Wal-Mart.
As soon as you grasp for that growth,
you're gonna view your customer differently,
you're gonna view your product differently,
you're gonna view your business differently.
You're gonna view everything that is the most important--
you're gonna view that differently.
This is our new organic line of popcorn.
This is Vitasoy soy milk,
the best soy milk in the entire world.
This entire show when it first started
was the size of this column right here.
Uh-huh.
Several of us were sleeping in our booths.
We couldn't afford hotel rooms.
Organic's been growing over 20% annually.
It's one of the fastest-growing segments in the food industry.
My God! Ah!
We're not gonna get rid of capitalism.
Certainly we're not gonna get rid of it
in the time that we need to arrest global warming
and reverse the toxification
of our air, our food and our water.
We need to be much more urgent.
If we attempt to make perfect the enemy of the good
and say we're only going to buy food
from the most-perfect system
within 100 miles of us, we're never gonna get there.
As an environmentalist, it was pretty clear to me
that business was the source of all the pollution,
business was the source of basically all the things
that were destroying this world.
In college I came across this little institute
called New Alchemy Institute,
which was a group of renegade biologists.
My hope is to give you--
We were preaching a kind of a new religion,
trying to develop food and waste-treatment alternatives,
but we were preaching to the convinced.
We were depending on sources of support that were dried up
and we weren't reaching the audience
that really needed these messages.
I realized we need to not be David
up against Goliath. We need to be Goliath.
When we started out, we were a seven-cow farm.
We wanted to prove that business could be part of the solution
to the globe's environmental problems.
At the same time we had to prove
that we could be highly profitable.
Today in 2008, not only are
we the #3 yogurt brand in America,
but we're among the most profitable.
See, this is the interesting thing.
A little company like this is now Kraft,
but you don't have any idea that it's Kraft.
This is now Pepsi. That's now Kellogg's.
- Kashi is Kellogg's? - Yeah.
- This is Colgate now. - Oh, is it?
Yeah, this is one of those companies that started like us.
- Well, it's-- - Make them different?
Make them successful, basically.
The jury is out. I have to put it that way.
These large companies don't grow organically.
They grow by acquisition.
Coke, Pepsi, Kellogg's, General Mills--
all of them are running,
not walking, into the organic food business.
For me, when a Wal-Mart enters the organic space,
I'm thrilled. It's absolutely one of the most exciting things.
I have dreamed of the day
when I could sit with corporate titans
and have conversations
about organics and sustainability.
- This is Amanda. This is Rand. - Hi Amanda. I'm Rand.
- Rand, nice to meet you. - Tony.
- Tony. Great. - Nice to meet you.
Okay, help me figure out where--
- We both work for Wal-Mart. - You're with Wal-Mart.
Yup.
Do you know that we don't go to Wal-Mart?
- We've never been. - Oh yeah.
- Isn't that amazing? - So we had to come to you.
Yeah, we've never been.
We just started boycotting a long time ago
and we just kept riding on that.
Wal-Mart is terribly sensitive
to their reputation.
They've obviously been vilified,
probably more than any retailer
in our current economy.
Actually, it's a pretty easy decision
to try to support things like organic, or whatever it might be,
based on what the customer wants.
We see that and react to it.
So if it's clear the customer wants it,
it's really easy to get behind it,
to push forward and try to make that happen.
When I run into my old environmental friends,
many are initially horrified
by the kinds of company that I'm keeping these days.
But when I then go on to explain
what the impact of one purchase order from Wal-Mart is,
in terms of not pounds but tons of pesticide,
tons of herbicide, tons of chemical fertilizer,
the discussion-- we get away from the emotion
and we get down to the facts.
This is really key, though, what you guys are doing here.
I have no illusions about this.
I don't believe that Wal-Mart has come here
because they've suddenly had a moral enlightenment.
It's because of economics.
I can debate with my radical friends all day long,
but nobody can challenge the fact
that a sale of another million dollars to Wal-Mart
helps to save the world.
Back around the turn of the last century,
the average farmer could feed six or eight people.
Now the average American farmer
can feed 126 people, okay?
These are the most productive humans that have ever lived.
The changes down on the farm have been
momentous and radical but invisible to most of us,
'cause who knows a farmer anymore?
But their way of life
has been revolutionized.
10,000 years ago,
farmers started saving their best seeds
and planted again in the following year.
That's how seeds have been developed.
That's how corn was developed
from a useless grass for the most part
to the extremely productive plant it is today.
The idea that any corporation could own a food crop
is a very new idea. It wasn't until the 1980s
that the Supreme Court said you could patent life.
And that opened the floodgates--
efforts to patent the most valuable parts of life,
which is to say the crops on which we depend.
Monsanto is a chemical company.
They produced DDT, Agent Orange in Vietnam,
and then they developed a product called "Roundup."
We started hearing rumblings about genetically-engineered soybeans
that could resist the application of Roundup.
When the Roundup was sprayed over top of it,
it killed every weed out there
except for this Roundup Ready soybean.
I can remember when the first prohibition
against seed saving came into being.
Most farmers were just
absolutely disgusted with the whole concept.
It's been interesting over the course
of 11 years to watch us go
from utter contempt for the notion
that we can't save our own seed
to acceptance.
What happens if a farmer
saves the seeds?
Well, you know, really there's
only one company involved in this now
and that's Monsanto.
Monsanto is...
They've got a team of private investigators
that kind of roam the country
and they've got a little 1-800 hotline
they take calls on. If they get a call
and somebody alleges that somebody saved seed,
they'll send an investigator out to look into the matter.
If you save your own seed, you're gonna get a call
from somebody from Monsanto.
Two men drove in my driveway
at 7:00, 7:30 at night,
presented a black card to me
and they never told me that they were from Monsanto.
They said that they had had a surveillance team,
caught me cleaning beans.
I found it necessary to get up
at 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning
before the investigators are on the road following me.
They were--
I'm gonna say maybe ex-military or ex-police.
They were large and they were intimidating.
I don't know whether they had their surveillance team
or whether it was my neighbor that turned me in. I don't know.
Now as I turned to walk in the house, one of them said--
I could hear in the back-- "He's guilty."
It's a real ingenious device designed back in the 1800s,
and Monsanto's gonna close all of them out.
So how many seed cleaners are out there
in the country do you think?
In the state of Indiana, there may be six.
Maybe. I'm not aware of--
- How many there used to be? - Oh my golly. Every county had three.
Have they all been put out of business?
There's nobody left.
When Monsanto soybeans first came on the market,
I just never really switched over.
I was getting pretty good yield
with the conventional soybeans I'd been using,
so I thought "Well, I'll just stay where I'm at."
My neighbors all around me are all GMOs.
If the pollen goes in, if the seed moves in,
I am still held accountable.
When you genetically modify a crop, you own it.
We've never had this in agriculture.
Used to be that your land-grant universities,
they developed what was called public seed.
The vast majority of the plant breeding
was actually done in these public institutions
Monsanto is very much like Microsoft.
The same way Microsoft owns the intellectual property
behind most computers in America,
they set out to own the intellectual property
behind most of the food in America.
Public plant breeding is a thing of the past.
There virtually are no public seeds anymore.
There's only like four or five varieties
that I can actually plant.
Now I have some of the last soybeans
coming out of the state of Illinois--
- That are not GMO. - Public variety. Public variety.
When it comes to the point that I can't buy any more certified seed,
what do I do? What are my options?
I acquired this list that was mailed to me.
The black list here is Monsanto's unauthorized growers list.
Wow.
Either farmers that have judgments against them,
or businesses, or else it's--
or it's farmers that have not submitted their paperwork,
will not turn over their records.
For my case, that's why I'm on there--
'cause I would not turn over my records.
- Am I on this list? - Yes, you are.
Wow.
I see two of the farmers that I work for on here.
This list-- now it comes down to the point
where I cannot buy Monsanto products, okay?
Right.
So it's coming down to "What can I plant?"
Monsanto is suing me on the basis
that I'm encouraging the farmer to break the patent law
by cleaning their own seed.
I haven't been in a courtroom yet
and my bill is already $25,000.
People that were friends of mine
now are reticent to even talk with me.
We've been friends for 50 years,
and now we can hardly be seen together.
Right.
I don't think I'm really guilty,
but it was cheaper to pay the fine
than it was to try to fight it.
- It gnaws at you... - Sure.
...because if you think you're right at something,
but yet you admit you're wrong.
Monsanto falsely accused us of violating their patent
and breach of contract.
None of it was true.
You go into a market, you find a dominant farmer
and if you can ruin them, you scare the rest of them to following the line.
My family spent $400,000
fighting the battle, pretrial.
And we were told it would take another million
to take the thing to trial.
We settled out of court.
The way the system appeared to work to me was
Lady Justice had the scales
and you piled cash on the scales
and the one that piled the most cash on the scales,
hired the most experts and was most willing
to tell the biggest lies, that was the winner.
That seems to be how our justice system functions now.
It's terrible. It's terrible.
How can a farmer defend himself against
a multinational corporation like Monsanto?
I talked to a young man just three days ago.
They'd been to his farm, you know?
And this poor kid, he's just starting out.
His fiancée was there. I talked to her
and tried to give them the best advice I could.
Unfortunately the best advice I could give them was
"Try to get out of this thing with your skin intact.
Don't fight 'em. You've got to roll over
and give them what they want, 'cause you can't defend yourself."
In the case of Monsanto, their control is so dominant.
If you want to be in production agriculture,
you're gonna be in bed with Monsanto.
They own the soybean.
They are going to control that product
from seed to the supermarket.
They are, in effect, gaining control of food.
There has been this revolving door
between Monsanto's corporate offices
and the various regulatory
and judicial bodies that have made the key decisions.
Justice Clarence Thomas was a Monsanto attorney.
That wouldn't be such a big deal
if it weren't for one court case
that really decided this whole seed-saving issue.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion
in a case that allowed these companies
to prevent farmers from saving their own seed.
Monsanto had very close ties
to the Bush administration...
and the Clinton administration.
This goes to why we haven't had much political debate
over this radical change to our food system.
For the last 25 years, our government
has been dominated by the industries
that it was meant to be regulating.
The challenge is as soon as you have people
with expertise in industry, they may turn out to be very good regulators.
It's really about what interests they decide to represent.
You're talking about power--
centralized power
and that power is being used
against the people who are really producing the food
like the farmers.
It's being used against the workers
who work for these companies
and it's being used against consumers
who are deliberately being kept in the dark
about what they're eating, where it comes from
and what it's doing to their bodies.
Good afternoon, Madame Chair and members.
SB-63 is a consumer right-to-know measure.
It simply requires that all foods that are cloned
must be labeled as cloned foods.
These cloned animals are
a fundamentally new thing.
But I find it incredible that the FDA
not only wants to allow the sale of meat from cloned animals
without further research,
but also wants to allow the sale of this meat
without any labeling.
How many witnesses in opposition, please?
Noelle Cremers with California Farm Bureau.
And if I can point out--
the reason that we are concerned with labeling
is it creates unnecessary fear in a consumer's mind.
Until the industry has an opportunity
to educate why we want to use this technology
and the value of the technology,
we don't feel that consumers just having
a warning label will help them.
These companies fight tooth and nail
against labeling.
The fast food industry fought against
giving you the calorie information.
They fought against telling you
if there's trans fat in their food.
The meat packing industry for years prevented
country-of-origin labeling.
They fought not to label genetically modified foods,
and now 78% of the processed food in the supermarket
has some genetically- modified ingredient.
I think it's one of the most important battles
for consumers to fight--
is the right to know what's in their food and how it was grown.
Not only do they not want
you to know what's in it,
they have managed to make it against the law
to criticize their products.
Can you tell me how you've changed how you eat?
Yeah, we--
you'll probably have to talk to an attorney
before you would put this in there.
What? You can say this is-- we've stopped--
I know, but--
I could have the meat and poultry industry
coming after me and I really--
Seriously? For saying-- that it's so--
It depends on the context.
You're not saying "Someone else don't eat it."
Yeah, I'm sorry, Robbie,
but I get asked this all the time.
Initially, my reaction was
"I don't care. Let them sue me.
Let them try and sue the mother
of a dead child and see."
It's pretty amazing that you can't say
- how you and your family have changed-- - The veggie libel laws...
are different.
The food industry has different protections
than other industries do.
We have a lot of questions about this mad cow disease.
If you recall the case where Oprah was sued
by the meat industry
for something she said on her show.
It has just stopped me cold
from eating another burger.
- Good morning, Oprah. - Good morning, y'all.
Are you glad to see it's finally winding down?
Well, I think I can say that, right?
I can say that, yeah. I can see the end in sight.
In Colorado it's a felony
if you're convicted under a veggie libel law.
So you could go to prison
for criticizing the ground beef
that's being produced in the state of Colorado.
There is an effort in several farm states
to make it illegal to publish
a photo of any industrial food operation,
any feedlot operation.
At the same time, they've also gotten
bills passed that are called cheeseburger bills
that make it very very difficult
for you to sue them.
These companies have legions of attorneys
and they may sue even though they know they can't win
just to send a message.
We are on record for the deposition of Maurice Parr
in the matter of Monsanto Company
and Monsanto Technology versus Maurice Parr.
Mr. Parr, we subpoenaed your bank records
in this case. Do you know that?
I'll tell you, what really scared me the most today
was the fact that they have every check that I have written
from every bank account that I've used
in the last 10 years.
Do you own any land, Mr. Parr?
- Yes. - How many acres do you own?
Three.
How long have you had this Dell computer?
Which ones are soybean seed cleaning customers?
- Mr. Kaufman? - Beans only.
These people are not just customers,
they're personal friends.
It's extremely heart-wrenching for me
to know that this list is in the possession of Monsanto.
Harold Sinn?
Beans only.
This is the first case
in which a seed company is suing
the person who does the cleaning of the seed.
So if Monsanto's claims are upheld in this case,
that would not only put Moe out of business,
but it would prohibit every grower in the country
from doing what Moe does as a precedent in future cases.
Have any of these customers specifically
told you that they are not going to use
- your seed-cleaning services anymore? - Ron Merrill.
This essentially puts me out of business.
- Max Lowe. - I'm finished.
Jerry Kaufman. Bill Zeering.
Robert Duvall.
We've had a food system that's been dedicated
to the single virtue of efficiency,
so we grow a very small number of crops,
a very small number of varieties,
a very small number of companies.
And even though you achieve efficiencies,
the system gets more and more precarious.
You will have a breakdown eventually.
And where the breakdown comes in the system
we don't always know.
Modern production agriculture is highly dependent
on large amounts of petroleum.
Our farm, we're going to use
about 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year.
We eat a lot of oil without knowing it.
To bring a steer to slaughter,
it's 75 gallons of oil.
So what we're seeing is
that this highly-efficient machine
does not have the resilience to deal with shocks
such as the spike in oil prices.
Food prices last month were 3.9% higher
than they were a year ago.
Take corn, another basic source of food,
up to a 12-year high.
For a while, we could sell grains
so cheaply anywhere in the world,
farmers in other countries who aren't being subsidized
could not compete with us.
So their capacity to grow food
for themselves was compromised.
The world's running out of food
and nobody's talking about it. We have no reserves.
There have been protests around the world.
The food crisis has already brought down one government.
A month doesn't go by
where there isn't a story in the news
that peels back the curtain
on how that industrial food is made.
Downer cows-- too ill or lame to walk--
being brutalized to get them to their feet for slaughter.
Millions of gallons of concentrated hog manure
flushing their contents downriver.
Government's food czar reported
that there are no tools in place to track
the origin of the latest salmonella outbreak.
Every time one of these stories comes out,
America learns a little bit more--
what's going on in the kitchen where their food is being prepared.
And every time they turn away in revulsion
and start looking for alternatives.
The irony is that the average consumer
does not feel very powerful.
They think they are the recipients
of whatever industry has put out there
for them to consume.
Trust me, it's the exact opposite.
When we run an item past the supermarket scanner,
we're voting for local or not, organic or not.
At Wal-Mart, we made a decision about a year ago
to go through a process of becoming rBST-free in our milk supply.
We made that decision based on customer preference.
Individual consumers
changed the biggest company on earth
and in so doing,
probably put the last nail in the coffin
for synthetic growth hormone.
To eat well in this country costs more
than to eat badly. It will take more money
and some people simply don't have it.
And that's one of the reasons
that we need changes at the policy level,
so that the carrots are a better deal than the chips.
People think "These companies are so big
and so powerful, how are we ever going to change things?"
But look at the tobacco industry.
It had huge control over public policy
and that control was broken.
The battle against tobacco is a perfect model
of how an industry's irresponsible behavior
can be changed.
Imagine what it would be if, as a national policy,
we said we would be only successful
if we had fewer people going
to the hospital next year than last year.
How about that for success?
The idea then would be to have
such nutritionally dense
unadulterated food
that people who ate it actually felt better,
had more energy,
and weren't sick as much.
Now see, that's a noble goal.
I can't change the fact that Kevin's dead.
When you tell somebody you've lost a child,
I really don't like that look of pity
that comes into their eyes,
that they feel sorry for me.
I can have a pity party all by myself very well,
thank you. I don't need it from other people.
What I need them to do is listen
and help me effect a change.
You have to understand that we farmers,
we're gonna deliver to the marketplace what the marketplace demands.
If you want to buy $2 milk,
you're gonna get a feedlot in the backyard. It's that simple.
People have got to start demanding
good, wholesome food of us.
And we'll deliver. I promise you.
We're very ingenious people. We'll deliver.
That's all I had to say.
♪ When I rode that ribbon highway ♪
♪ I saw above me ♪
♪ The endless skyway ♪
♪ I saw below me ♪
♪ The golden valley ♪
♪ Well, this land was made for you and me ♪
♪ I roamed and rambled ♪
♪ I followed my footsteps ♪
♪ Through the sparkling sands of ♪
♪ Her diamond deserts ♪
♪ And all around me ♪
♪ A voice was calling ♪
♪ It said "This land was made for you and me" ♪
♪ This land is your land ♪
♪ This land is my land ♪
♪ From California ♪
♪ To the New York island ♪
♪ From the redwood forests ♪
♪ To the Gulf Stream waters ♪
♪ Well, this land was made for you and me ♪
♪ Now the sun came shining ♪
♪ And I was strolling ♪
♪ Through wheat fields waving ♪
♪ And dust clouds rolling ♪
♪ And a voice was sounding ♪
♪ As the fog was lifting ♪
♪ It said "This land was made for you and me" ♪
♪ This land is your land ♪
♪ This land is my land ♪
♪ From California ♪
♪ To the New York islands ♪
♪ From the redwood forest ♪
♪ To the Gulf Stream waters ♪
♪ Oh, this land was made for you and me. ♪