If You Like Eating Hamburgers, You Best Not Know What’s In It….

I’ve always thought myself to be pretty up to date and aware of where my food came from, and what was in it. Growing up in the rural countryside of Southeast England, everything we ever ate was farm fresh and purchased from a farmer’s market or local butcher. After moving, my parents were still conscious of where they bought the food from and whether it’s organic or not, but there were so many more locations to go to, and more choices of produce in those stores that finding farm-fresh, organic meat and vegetables was much more of an effort. However, we made it work, and so far we’ve had no problems.

For the past week in Food & Literature, we’ve been watching Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. (2008), and I never thought I’d be affected so greatly by a documentary with this subject matter like this. I’ve read Skinny Bitch by Rory Freedman & Kim Barnouin, and the descriptions within were enough to make you wish you’d never eaten anything but ‘bunny food’, but Food, Inc. was something else entirely. The footage was shudder-inducing, and some of animal slaughtering scenes actually caused a verbal reaction of horror and disgust from the majority of the classroom.

The one thing that stood out for me the most from Food, Inc. was the section of the documentary about Barbara Kowalcyk and her story of her 2 ½ year old son, Kevin. Her story was enough to bring tears to your eyes, that something as simple as eating three hamburgers on a family vacation could cause an event as awful as the death of a 2 year old child from an E. coli O157:H7 infection was just an outrage. It took an incredibly long time to ‘prove’ the cause of Kevin’s infection, “In November, under the Freedom of Information Act, we requested the DNA fingerprints from the USDA for all meat recalls in 2001. It took several threatened lawsuits and 6 months for us to receive all the information. In 2003, after receiving and reviewing all the documents, we discovered that the PFGE pattern (or DNA) of Kevin’s E. coli matched that of a meat recall in August 2001” (http://www.foodborneillness.org/leadership/140-kevins-story.html), and even then, the meat companies which were responsible for Kevin’s food borne illness would not be held accountable, and the law that Kowalcyk was/is trying to pass, Kevin’s Law, is far from being so. “In the end, we were not able to prove conclusively that the recalled meat was what caused Kevin’s illness and dropped our lawsuit. It is hard knowing that those responsible for producing the defective product that killed our child will not be held accountable. What happened to our son, Kevin is tragic. Unfortunately, he is not alone. Each year in the United States, thousands of Americans suffer and die from preventable food borne illness.” (http://www.foodborneillness.org/leadership/140-kevins-story.html).

Photo Credit: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-10577344/stock-photo-price-tag-on-a-large-package-of-raw-hamburger.html