Raanan Bar-Cohen

For a couple of years I’ve been meaning to watch this documentary Food Inc, about how food is now produced in the U.S. — and just the other week saw that it became available on Netflix streaming and had no excuse — watched it on my iMac that night.

I found it to be a pretty powerful movie and the interviews with the farmers were very revealing. The stats on FDA investigations, and E. coli contamination were hard to argue with.

And is if on queue, this story popped into my stream today “1 million pounds of ground beef recalled: 7 people sickened by E. coli after eating meat from California company” while I was eating a quick bite, and I just had to blog this

My $.02: Cost and lack of choice make it hard for everyone to pick locally grown produce and organic meats. I think efforts to have food labels include the source of the food, treatment of the animals, etc — and make it available online — are a good approach to this. Then people can vote with their pocketbooks on what foods they want to consume, and hopefully drive the marketplace to better choices and better pricing as farmers gain predictability of demand. In fact, in Food Inc there is a segment on how Walmart is moving in the direction of offering more sustainable and organic foods — purely because that’s where the market is heading and that’s what their customers want.

Movie trailer below: