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When I was 10 years old, the phrase "Do you want a Happy Meal?" was the best sound ever! I mean the food was good but the true reason why I would go was to dig deep into the box of joy and get that Alvin and the Chipmunks toy it came with. I did not care if was chicken nuggets, a hamburger or fries. As long as it was good I would eat it. I lived that way for many years, failing to realize the reality that waited for me inside what I thought was a box of joy.
In the movie, Food Inc., the viewers where taken inside a hidden, dark, cruel world, showing us the truth behind how our food including "the Happy Meal" makes its way to your hands. From the real ingredients to the way many of our parents are treated.
When Richard and Maurice McDonald, better known as the McDonald brothers, opened their first restaurant; "McDonalds" in the year 1940, it was a typical restaurant, with people delivering your food to your table on roller skates. But one day it all changed. The McDonald brothers wanted to cut
cost by creating a new process. A process know as the "factory way" of making food.
This "factory way" of making food was a huge benefit for their company because they where able to make lots of food without wasting a lot of money. 8 out of 10 burgers are controlled by four companies this made them very rich. They also didn't pay the workers a lot because they would simply fire them if they complained.
When you go the grocery store with your parents and they buy a package of chicken, you see a picture of happy chickens in a big beautiful green field, and they seem to have lived a good life. According to the movie Food Inc., it is the complete opposite! Those chickens do not live in a beautiful green field, they are all squished together in a big cage. The poor chickens could barely move. Also they would inject the baby chickens to make them grow super fast, they would be full grown in only 49 days. That would then cause the chickens to be so heavy that they can't even stand up. They would spend their entire life laying on their stomachs; they would loose their feathers and would get a rash for spending to much time laying down.
I bet you did not know that the chicken you eat all the time were treated with no love and care. This is because the companies try to hide things from us. According to the film, the filmmakers had a hard time to get inside the awful chicken prisons. Because companies like Tyson will not give them permission to enter. They didn't want us to see the truth because then we might change our mind and not want to buy the food they make.
Chickens are not the only animals that are not treated right, cows and pigs are part of the misery too. Cows are meant to be fed grass, but this film shows that they are fed corn. Companies do this because corn can be grown without wasting a lot of money. A little bit less than half of the United States land is used to grow corn. A lot of the food you eat has some corn in it, from ketchup, chips, Twinkies, even Kool-Aid.
When you eat something that you are not suppose to, it messes up your stomach, it is the same thing with cows. They get sick with E.Coli, which is dangerous sickness to us humans if we eat at a large amount.
In 2001, little two year old Kevin Kowalcyk died when getting sick after eating a hamburger that contained that dangerous sickness. The U.S government is responsible for his death because they don't make the rules stricter. There are people that work to make sure the food we eat is healthy. But if his food had E.Coli in it then the people didn't do their job right, causing the death of a child. There are ways to make sure that the food we eat doesn't have bad germs that make us sick. By just feeding the cows what they are suppose to be eating in the first place, grass, for five days, it would lower the amount of E.Coli in the cow by a lot.
Other then E.Coli, many people are dying from other sicknesses caused from what we eat, like obesity and diabetes. Being over weight is mostly caused because people are suffering from poverty, but they do not have the money to buy expansive food. So they buy the cheapest meal possible, fast food. Those type of foods have high amounts of fats, slats, sugars and calories; all that causes obesity which leads to diabetes.
All these sicknesses and deaths can be cut down if we simply change the "factory way" of making food and go back to raising chickens, cows and pigs in a healthy clean way, the "farm way" of making food. But all these companies are making so much money that they don't want to.
Large meet packing plants are making so much money. According to the movie Food Inc., these companies are making so much food at a low cost to them. They treat their workers bad. The workers are illegally brought to work at those companies and since they to not have any say, rights, or benefits, the company controls them. I bet you did not know that.
There is so much more that is being hidden from you. Cheap industrial food is known to be full of lies. This is because environmental, societal and health cost is not included. Even though there is so much that you should have the right to know, laws prevent the truth from coming out. These big companies have connections with the government that protects them. They also have a law that doesn't allow us to say anything bad about the products they make through media like the internet, elevision, ect. and will sue us if we do. When we want to sue them, they have what is called the Burger Bills, that makes it very difficult to sue them. All these secrets are why your so called "happy meal," isn't so happy after all.
