America’s Food Production Industry

The documentary Food Inc. exposes the inner workings of America’s food production industry, providing an unsettling bird’s eye view its abuse of American famers and its McDonaldized manner of producing our nation’s food supply. The documentary also reveals the mechanized manner in which food is made, doing away with major food production companies’ slogans and advertisements that falsely lead consumers to believe that real farmers, using only natural resources, grow their products. Furthermore, these food production empires have played a major role in McDonaldizing the food industry through religiously abiding by the four dimension of McDonaldization: efficiency, predictability, calculability and control. Throughout their existence they have successfully made their products readily available in every store nationwide, produced a large quantities in record time and homogenized the work their factory workers and even farmers.

When it comes to efficiency, emphasis is basically placed on the speed at which goods and services are produced and received. The way in which these major companies provide their respective efficiency can be explained simply by the availability of these companies’ products. For instances, we never hear of a shortage in Tyson brand meat in local supermarkets, they are readily available in surplus to millions of consumers. In fact their efficiency is so efficient that it becomes an irrationality, this is because their “just in case” overstocking causes a major surplus of their product, forcing the supermarkets to sell the excess meat supply that are near expiration at a lower price costing both Tyson and the store money.

The predictability of a McDonaldized model is important because it provides both comfor...

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...left to chance and the only way to control potential outcomes is to effectively create and regulate the rules of engagement. An example of this control presented in Food Inc. is the ability of companies to patent seeds for crop. This has been a popular trend and is something former chemical company Monsanto has accomplished. As presented in the documentary, Monsanto patented a gene of 90% of the nation’s soybean seeds, and as a precedent of this patent, farmers in the U.S. were not allowed to either reuse or save these soybean seeds so they were forced to purchase new seeds each season, this resulted in the bankruptcy of many American farmers. Since these major companies have accumulated so much power and influence (especially over the USDA and FDA) through their control of the food industry, that some disgruntled farmers have been silenced in fear of a lawsuit.