Moooooo

Imagine being forced through a narrow, pitch-black aisle with thousands of other people surrounding and shoving each other. Without knowing at all where you are, a giant machine pushes you through a gas chamber. You struggle to breathe and are able to choke up a few last gulps of air. Before you know it, you are dead. This is the situation that animals, specifically cows, chickens, and pigs, are put in every single day. While watching Food Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2008), images and clips of slaughterhouses in the country caught my eye. I saw animals being beheaded, chemically poisoned, and tortured in many different ways as a source of food for America. These clips showed me the ugly truth of the corruption in the pastoral world. Farmers and workers kick poor, innocent chickens like they are soccer balls. Then they shove them into a cone shaped container and slit their throats. Dead, skinned, headless animals hang by their ankles on this beastly machine that swings them around to the poor people that have to shave all the meat off. The movie showed thousands of the dead bodies in the factories that are all over the country. Some of the animals never even see the light of day. They are detained in these evil houses and factories where they are brutally butchered up. Not only did the scenes of the slaughterhouse shock me, but also the images of where the meat went afterwards were disturbing. Assembly lines cut around and threw the meat into parts of a factory like it was garbage. The meat goes through a long process of being mashed up, cut up, and formed into bricks to be sent off to yet another factory. As I watched the meat chunks circulate around the factory, I did not even realize that it was hamburger meat that was being processed. The block of food looked more like intestines than edible meat. As it was pointed out in the movie, the labels showing happy cows on nice farms deceive society; it is in factories, not at farms, where our meat is produced. Next time you look at that happy cow on the box of a food product, picture it being pushed over, kicked around, killed, and skinned. Yum. All of the images and scenes of the slaughterhouses and factories in Food Inc. were quite disturbing. They show how our hamburger meat, our juicy bacon, and chicken sandwich are made. Next time I take a bite into a filet mignon, I will think back to these snapshots as a harsh verity of reality.