On the eve of her 19th birthday, my daughter returned home from university for a visit. She brought with her a popular current documentary she wanted me to see called “Food Inc.”
For those who haven’t seen the documentary, it focuses on how a few multi-national corporations control our North American food system, churning out a lot of unhealthy, cheap food that is having a detrimental effect on our health.
I suppose my daughter wanted me to see “Food Inc.” because I am a farmer, although I wasn’t exactly clear what that meant in terms of our relationship. As a parent, I had gone from her hero when she was a child to a zero as she careened through the turbulent teenage years. Now, approaching adulthood and maturity, I was hoping to slowly regain some of my hero status, as parents often do when their children begin to wrestle with some of the same problems their parents have faced.
However, this welcomed attitude reversal has been interrupted, I think, by some lingering suspicion attributed not to the teenage-parent relationship but as the result of my simply being a farmer.
Farmers have traditionally been regarded as honest, hard-working and proudly independent characters, all of which should have assisted in gaining back my daughter’s admiration and respect. But it wasn’t working for me.
I noticed her glancing at me sideways out of the corner of her eye several times during the documentary. A farmer walked through a broiler barn picking up dead chickens suffocated by their own bloated genetically modified body weight in horribly crowded conditions. Another looked after thousands of nervous feedlot cattle, enhanced with growth hormones and covered in their own feces. Terrified pigs were shoved by a huge steel mechanism kicking and squealing onto a floor for a mass electrocution in a slaughtering plant.
Like many of her generation, my daughter had already become a vegetarian, one of many positions used to challenge me every time my fork contacted a morsel of meat at the family supper table. If a person is seen as either part of the problem or part of the solution, I’m sure I was placed in the former.
Throughout the documentary — based in the United States — it was suggested that the cheap government subsidized corn grown by farmers is the culprit in creating the diet of fats, starches and sugars causing the wave of obesity in the younger generation. Instead of the down-home, awe-shucks goodness of a Jimmy Crack Corn, farmers came out looking more like Jimmy Crack Cocaine dealers.
In defense of myself and my profession, I suggested to her that unfortunately farmers are the least independent people in our society. We both buy and sell to the few companies controlling our industry. This, in fact, was clearly demonstrated in the documentary. An older gentleman who had long made his living cleaning seed for farmers wanting to save and use their own seed was crushed financially in court by the Monsanto corporation for providing that service.
Shifting the blame is a standard tactic for a child when a parent accuses him or her of a wrongdoing. My daughter was then still very familiar with it and easily recognized it in others.
This wasn’t working for me either.
In desperation, I attempted to describe farmers as the victims of industrialized agriculture rather than the perpetrators. Bound to our genetically modified plants and intensified livestock facilities by a financial pact made with our corporate masters, what choice do we have? The smiling face of a farmer with a straw hat is often used on the label to sell food products on supermarket shelves but, in reality, a farmer couldn’t tell you what’s in the food either.
At this point in the documentary, the commentator said farmers, although resistant at first, had eventually handed control of the food system over to corporations for the sake of convenience and promised profits. Instead of a quick sideways glance, I got an extended accusatory stare from my daughter.
How can one explain farming to teenagers or university students? They are so idealistic.