Have you seen Food, Inc.?

You should, unless you do not care about the freedoms we take for granted that are being taken away on a daily basis. My wife, daughter and I watched this documentary on Sunday, June 21. My Chinese father-in-law went too. He doesn't speak English and my wife translated.

Most Americans know very little about the food we eat. Four huge corporations manufacture and package most of that food. Food, Inc. shows that these corporations own the American government and legal system. Our elected government in this so-called free country with two dominant political parties helps these corporations keep us from knowing where our food comes from. It is deliberate.

Imagine being charged for a felony and going to jail because you complained publically about the hamburger you ate that put you in the hospital and almost killed you. It is true. Some states have laws that make it a felony to talk about this subject and to name the products or companies involved.

Barbara Kowalcyk was interviewed for the film. She lost her 2-1/2 year old son to the American food industry this documentary talks about. He went from being healthy to dead in a matter of days after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli. After that, she becomes a food safety advocate meeting politicians and asking for their help. Barbara story is heartbreaking. Yet, in this free country, she's not allowed to talk about the food her son ate that killed him, or she can be sued. She can only talk about the laws she would like to see implemented to help protect us.

Oprah talked about bad meat several years ago on her show. She was sued. Oprah won but it cost her a million dollars. Do you have a million dollars? That’s what it may cost you to exercise your freedom of speech, which doesn’t exist when it comes to this topic. 

There was a farmer in the film that once grew regular soybeans. The huge corporation that holds the patent for genetically altered soybeans sued him. The farmer had to prove that he wasn’t growing their soybeans. Before the case went to court, it cost that farmer almost a half million dollars in legal fees. He went broke and had to settle out of court. The corporation with its billions of dollars and hundreds of lawyers won because it had more money.

That is why a huge conglomerate that owns the rights for genetically altered soybeans now controls ninety percent the soybeans we eat. It’s the same for corn.

How did this happen? If the wind blows some stray seed onto a farmer’s property from another farm and those seeds start to grow, that farmer ‘will’ be sued by that corporation. The Supreme Court of the United States made that legal. President Bush (#2) and President Clinton helped make that happen.

The corporation that owns the rights to those genetically altered seeds now owns a part of nature and can sell it to us against our will thanks to our government. That same corporation has close to a hundred agents traveling around the country investigating until the other ten percent of American farmers grow their soybeans too. All those agents have to do is find one soybean plant that came from one of their seeds on a farm. Then the corporation lines up their lawyers and sues until they break the farmer and he signs the out-of-court settlement agreeing to buy and grow their soybeans.

Gee, I am so glad I live in a free country where my rights are protected--NOT. In addition, to think that when I was nineteen, I joined the United States Marines and fought in Vietnam for freedoms that don’t exist anymore and most American’s don’t even know they are gone until, like Barbara Kowalcyk, you lose your son to that system and cannot even talk about it in detail.

How often do you hear about this American food topic in the Western mainstream media in this detail compared to how often you hear about China and the so-called lack of freedoms in that country that you know nothing about because you have never been there? I've been to china more than a dozen times since 1999, and I can say that it isn't as bad as the Western Media makes China sound.

By the way, the company that owns the rights to the seeds used to grow 90% of the soybeans in America also sells products to farmers in China. The difference is that in China the farmers have more protection from their government, and it is harder to use the legal system there to force Chinese farmers to buy those genetically modified soybean seeds.