"Food, Inc"- A Book That Will Change Your Life

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“Marley & Me” made me ache for a cute little fur ball to call my own. “Under the Tuscan Sun” had me THIS close to abandoning America and heading to the hills of Italy to spend my days baking biscotti and binging on wine. But “Food, Inc” is one book that absolutely shifted my thinking by unmasking what we as a society are doing to our environment, economy and most importantly, our bodies by literally and figuratively feeding off of what industry leaders tell us is “food”.

In the grand scheme of things, our daily dietary intake doesn't seem as dire and life-threatening as issues such as global warming, war or disease epidemics. But “Food, Inc” addresses the fact that indeed, many of these large-scale problems that plague our lives are due in part to how we eat, what we eat and how we produce and distribute it. The morbid and life-altering information that is revealed within the pages of this shocking food-processing tell-all is makes you question the nutritional and ethical value of the information we have been wrongfully served for decades.

We all acknowledge that although consuming mass quantities of McDonald's, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut is appeasable to financial situations, it's completely detrimental to our health for a plethora of reasons. Happy Meals are an easy culprit for childhood obesity, and we can simply blame junk food vendors like Doritos and Kraft for our escalating heart disease rates. But there lurks thousands of other nemesis' to our rapidly decreasing grasp on what is truly healthy for our physical well-being. What “Food, Inc” so intricately details is that although we may shun the likes of BK and KFC and pride ourselves on our home-cooked meals of beef, chicken and good-for-you-veggies, inadequacies of our food growing and processing systems can still reek havoc on these seemingly healthy alternatives. Cooking the most innocent of meals from scratch can be devoid of nutrients when you consider the farm animals that end up on your plate are readily pumped full of damaging hormones and antibiotics or contained in such disease-ridden and abusive conditions that the benefits from their meat are counteracted by the appalling way they were raised. And those healthy salads are easily tainted by the onslaughts of pesticides and harmful chemicals showering the produce of America.

Everything the food industry doesn't want you to know is available for your consumption within “Food, Inc”, including disturbing cases of deaths from contaminated food, how processing certain foods is fueling global warming and the astonishing conditions field workers are subjected to. Choosing to become more knowledgeable about our food systems, learning the numerous upsides to going organic (no, it's really not outlandishly expensive) and recognizing that your diet actually does have a major impact on your health, our society and environment is a small but necessary step in the war against industrial food. As the book says, “you'll never look at dinner the same way”.