After watching Food, Inc I really was motivated to change how I live. I am seriously lacking motivation right now, even though I'm doing much better since my holiday decline. I'm just not excited about it. So I set out on Netflix to find that next Food, Inc. My choices are sorely limited, frankly, but I found a couple of contenders. This weeks flick is called Food Matters.

There is a great message here. There are some really bright people with a really great message. But you have to wade past the vegetarian/raw foods propaganda to get to it. At one hour and seventeen minutes, the film could nearly be divided into three unequal parts: 1) Bashing big medicine (YAY!), 2) Bashing Americans diets and industrialized foods (YAY!), and 3) Explaining why you'll go to hell for eating meat. Okay, maybe it's not quite that bad. But I, like a lot of other people, hear just those words when the vegetarian zealots come to give us our sermon. I do believe that most avid omnivores are just tired of being brow beaten and messages involving food and nutrition could be better communicated without telling us how wrong we are. Maybe I'm biased because I adore great meats, but humans are scientifically classified as omnivores. Meaning we're not wrong for loving animal carcass. We may be wrong for eating obscene quantities of deep fried, fat-laden, heavily processed animal carcasses. I am being more aware of where my meat comes from these days and how much of it I shovel in my pie hole.

The other thing that this film seems to miss is that people want to eat food that tastes good. Spirulina, by and large, does not taste good. It's not a meal. You can't sit with your family over a glass of spirulina and recap where the day took you. Eating well does not have to taste terrible. It's not about "health food" but it is about healthy food. This is a point that the film touches on. Depletion of nutrients in the soil from industrial, unnatural overfarming leads to reduced crops that cannot fend off disease on their own. So farmers pump the soil with chemical nutrients. Plants are sprayed with chemicals to keep pests and disease from claiming them. All of that shit ends up in our bodies. I honestly do not know just how efficient or inscrutable our nations bureaucracy is for determining what is "Certified Organic", but I will try to believe that by buying foods with this label, I am at least helping encourage farmers to not treat their crops in this manner. I also buy local organic as much as absolutely possible and have my own organic garden. I would like to think that my intake of poison has drastically decreased over the last two years.

My final word here is that this is a decent flick with some good information. It talks ad infinitum about the need for less prescriptions and more nutrition. About the healing power of food and vitamins. About the evils of industrialized, processed foods. And about the culture of poor health that we've all been lulled into being a part of. It is not the inspiration that Food, Inc. was, but Food, Inc. was a truly visionary, remarkable film. I was nearly turned off by the non-science that is presented in the film, but its worth the time spent. Give it a look.

Oh yeah, I really dig the theme song too!