Everyone should go see this movie. Run, do not walk, to the nearest theater, and watch it. It’s short (only an hour and a half) but well, well-worth the price of admission.

For those of you not hip enough to work for natural and organic food retailers or otherwise inclined to know anything at all about the American food supply business, FoodInc. is a rather disgusting look at the ways we produce food in this country, and all the things that are wrong with that process.

Up front, I will say (because I am a natural skeptic) that I am not convinced that 100% of everything presented in this movie is true. Like other documentaries of recent years (say, everything every done by Michael Moore) I’m sure the filmmakers cherry-picked the footage that made it to the finished version, and that means that the finished version is probably decidedly one-sided.

Still, there are some gems of facts in there.

For example, did you know that there are only 12 slaughterhouse/meatpacking plants left in the country? TWELVE. Forty years ago, there were thousands.

The Smithfield meat packing plant is operated almost exclusively by illegal immigrants… but no more than 15 a day are picked up by immigration officials.

Junk food is cheap on the shelf, because we subsidize the hell out of corn and soybeans. So it isn’t actually cheap.

There are fish farms out there that are trying to teach fish to eat corn. Why? Corn is cheap.

Trying to food cows corn is what has produced such lovely fuzzy things as hemorrhagic e.coli backeria.

I told you it was scary.

However, it also got me thinking about a few things, tangentially.

For example, so many people I know say they don’t bother to pay for “organic” food because the label is meaningless. That’s actually completely false. “Organic” as a food label is very, very strictly monitored by the FDA. In a nutshell, foods labeled organic must be from non-genetically modified seeds that have been grown in fields that have been free of chemical pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers for at least three years. Meat labeled organic must be from animals that have not been genetically modified and that have been fed food that could be sold to consumers as organic under FDA guidelines, and cannot have been exposed to synthetic hormones or antibiotics.

I think that most people think that the organic label is meaningless because they have a romantic vision for organic farms that is very similar to the romantic vision of conventional farms- individual farmers using common-sense, sustainable practices to produce good food without the addition of all the technology that is available to agribusiness farms.

But farming practices are not regulated by the FDA, and quite frankly shouldn’t be. Furthermore, organic certification for a farm is expensive. For the kind of small farmer that we envision, it is prohibitively expensive. And it’s a yearly expenditure- you have to renew certification every year.

This means that the only people who can afford organic certification, and thus sell their food as organic, are the same kind of large-scale, disgustingly unsustainable agribusiness farms that produce conventional food. It’s trucked around the country and around the world before it makes it to your supermarket and then your dinner table.

And so people think the label is meaningless.

It’s not meaningless, it just doesn’t mean what many people think it ought to mean in their pink-rose-colored-world.

If you really want good food grown well, you should be buying direct from farmers that you can see and talk to and visit. Go to farmer’s markets. Sign up for a community supported agriculture share. Can and preserve what you can’t eat fresh so that you have food all year round.

It’s really that simple.

You don’t get to have the wholesomeness we’ve lost in our food supply and retain the convenience that it’s been replaced with. You have to pick one or the other.

Which would you rather have?