Original subtitles

MICHAEL POLLAN: 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.

ERIC SCHLOSSER: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

TROY ROUSH: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

CAROLE MORISON: 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.

SCHLOSSER'S VOICE: 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.

(FILM PROJECTOR CLICKING)

SCHLOSSER: 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.

(MOOING)

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.

- (CHEEPING) - They not only changed the chicken,

they changed the farmer.

Today, chicken farmers no longer control their birds.

(THUDDING)

A company like Tyson

owns the birds from the day they're dropped off

until the day that they're slaughtered.

(BUZZES)

Let me go to the top.

- Man: 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.

(SNIFFS) Smells like money to me.

(CHUCKLES)

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.

(BARKS)

- What do you want? - (BARKS)

We have a contract with Tyson.

They've been growing chickens for many many years.

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.

(CHICKENS CLUCKING)

These chickens never see sunlight.

They're pretty much in the dark all the time.

MAN: 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 as far as y'all going in,

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.

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.

(LOUD CLUCKING)

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.

(FANS WHIRRING)

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.

(WHEEZES)

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.

(CLUCKING)

MORISON: 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.

The debt just keeps building.

To have no say in your business,

it's degrading.

It's like being a slave to the company.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: We produced a lot of corn

and they came up with uses for it.

LARRY JOHNSON: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: Corn is the main component in feed ingredients

whether it's chicken, hogs, cattle... you name it.

POLLAN: 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.

(COW MOOS)

MAN: 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.

MAN: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

MAN: A half a million pounds of ground beef...

MAN #2: Today, nationwide recalls of Con Agra ground beef.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

MAN #3: This is the 20th E. Coli outbreak with leafy Greens

in just the last decade.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

WOMAN: ConAgra, which recently recalled peanut butter

contaminated with salmonella,

was aware of problems in its plant two years ago.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

WOMAN: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

PATRICIA BUCK: 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.

KOWALCYK: 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.

KOWALCYK: 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. - DeGette: 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.

(WAVES LAPPING)

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.

KOWALCYK: You never get over the death of your child.

You find a new normal.

- Buck: This way? - Yes.

- We're going this way? - Mm-hmm.

KOWALCYK: 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.

KOWALCYK: 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.

- Kowalcyk: Yeah. - But I also know

that there are other players

- in the food production chain... - Kowalcyk: 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...

KOWALCYK: 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...

KOWALCYK: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

MAN: The 5x5 product surge tank...

low level. Low level.

(MAN SPEAKS OVER RADIO)

ELDON ROTH: 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.

(BEEPS)

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.

(WHIRRING)

ROTH: This is our finished product.

MAN: Is your meat in most of the hamburgers in the country?

ROTH: 70%.

In five years, we think we'll be in 100%.

We do have some competitors.

I think we're gonna beat them.

- (BUZZES) - Roth: Again, it's a marriage

of science and technology.

(MAN SPEAKING OVER RADIO)

I want dollar meal...

- five rodeo cheeseburgers... - Woman: Five rodeos. Okay.

...two chicken sandwich.

- Woman: Anything else? - Man: Two small drinks,

and give me a large Dr. Pepper.

- $11.48. - Thank you.

First window. Thank you.

MARIA GONZALEZ: 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.

MARIA: 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!

MARIA: 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."

POLLAN: 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.

MARIA: 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.

MARIA: 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.

(KIDS LAUGHING)

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

(CHICKENS CLUCKING)

JOEL SALATIN: 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.

(COWS MOOING)

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.

(KNIFE ZINGING)

- (CLUCKING) - (PEOPLE CHATTING)

SALATIN: We have allowed ourselves

to become so disconnected and ignorant

- about something that is as intimate... - (WHIRRING)

- ...as the food that we eat. - (BUBBLING)

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, piggies.

(SNORTING)

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?"

(LAUGHS)

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.

(SNORTING)

EDUARDO PEÑA: 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.

(PEOPLE CHATTING)

MAN: They have the same mentality towards workers

as they do towards the hogs.

(SQUEALING)

MAN: 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.

- (CLICKS, WHIRRING) - (SQUEALING)

MAN: 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.

MAN #2: You're covered with blood, feces, urine.

It's easy to get hurt down there.

MAN: 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.

MAN #3: You get people that can't afford

to leave from out there, and Smithfield knows this.

And that's what they hold over you.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

POLLAN: Things got better. They slowly got better.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

(YELLING)

POLLAN: So what happens to those million and a half Mexican farmers?

SCHLOSSER: 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.

(CLEARS THROAT)

PEÑA: Immigration agents are arresting Smithfield workers

- at this trailer park. - (PEOPLE CHATTING)

PEÑA: 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.

- (DOOR CLOSES) - (ENGINE STARTS)

- (PEÑA SPEAKING SPANISH) - (CAR HONKING)

- 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.

(MAN YELLING IN SPANISH)

PEÑA: 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.

(CAR STARTS)

And these companies are making billions of dollars.

SALATIN: 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.

MAN: It was about a five-hour drive

maybe 300, 400 miles.

So yeah.

It's worth it.

SALATIN: 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.

(SNORTING)

(PEOPLE CHATTING)

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.

MAN: 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...

HIRSHBERG: 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.

(CLACKING)

HIRSHBERG: 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.

- Man: 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.

HIRSHBERG: 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.

HIRSHBERG: 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. - Rand: 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.

HIRSHBERG: 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.

HIRSHBERG: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

MAN: What happens if a farmer

saves the seeds?

(CHUCKLES)

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.

DAVID RUNYON: 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.

MAN: They said that they had had a surveillance team,

caught me cleaning beans.

MOE PARR: 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.

RUNYON: They were...

I'm gonna say maybe ex-military or ex-police.

They were large and they were intimidating.

MAN: 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."

RUNYON: 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.

RUNYON: 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.

POLLAN: When you genetically modify a crop, you own it.

We've never had this in agriculture.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: Public plant breeding is a thing of the past.

There virtually are no public seeds anymore.

RUNYON: 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?"

PARR: 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... - Parr: Sure.

...because if you think you're right at something,

but yet you admit you're wrong.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: There has been this revolving door

between Monsanto's corporate offices

and the various regulatory

and judicial bodies that have made the key decisions.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

POLLAN: For the last 25 years, our government

has been dominated by the industries

that it was meant to be regulating.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

(KIDS LAUGHING)

WOMAN: 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.

(CHATTING)

POLLAN: 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.

MAN: 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...

(STAMMERS)

are different.

The food industry has different protections

than other industries do.

We have a lot of questions about this mad cow disease.

KOWALCYK: 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.

- Man: Good morning, Oprah. - Good morning, y'all.

MAN #2: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

MAN: We are on record for the deposition of Maurice Parr

in the matter of Monsanto Company

and Monsanto Technology versus Maurice Parr.

MAN #2: Mr. Parr, we subpoenaed your bank records

in this case. Do you know that?

PARR: 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.

MAN #2: Do you own any land, Mr. Parr?

- Yes. - Man #2: How many acres do you own?

Three.

MAN #2: How long have you had this Dell computer?

Which ones are soybean seed cleaning customers?

- Mr. Kaufman? - Beans only.

PARR: 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.

STEPHEN PENNELL: 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.

MAN #2: Have any of these customers specifically

told you that they are not going to use

- your seed-cleaning services anymore? - Ron Merrill.

PARR'S VOICE: This essentially puts me out of business.

- Max Lowe. - Parr's voice: I'm finished.

Jerry Kaufman. Bill Zeering.

Robert Duvall.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

POLLAN: 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.

ROUSH: The world's running out of food

and nobody's talking about it. We have no reserves.

MAN: There have been protests around the world.

The food crisis has already brought down one government.

POLLAN: 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.

(MOOING PITIFULLY)

MAN: Downer cows... too ill or lame to walk...

being brutalized to get them to their feet for slaughter.

WOMAN: Millions of gallons of concentrated hog manure

flushing their contents downriver.

WOMAN #2: Government's food Czar reported

that there are no tools in place to track

the origin of the latest salmonella outbreak.

POLLAN: 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.

HIRSHBERG: 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.

HIRSHBERG: Individual consumers

changed the biggest company on Earth

and in so doing,

probably put the last nail in the coffin

for synthetic growth hormone.

POLLAN: 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.

SCHLOSSER: 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.

(PEOPLE TALKING)

SALATIN: 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.

KOWALCYK: 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.

ROUSH: 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.

("THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" PLAYING)

(AUDIENCE CHEERING)

♪ 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. ♪

(HARMONICA PLAYING)

(CLASSICAL SCORE PLAYING)