Food Inc

Food Inc is a great documentary on Netflix that I'd highly recommend anybody to watch if you're interested in health or just the food industry in general.

Food Inc. was a very powerful documentary that brought forth a lot of information about the past, present and future food industry practices and techniques. The purpose of Food Inc. was to make the consumer aware of not only what goes on behind closed doors but also aware of where the food actually comes from and our buying power as consumers.

In the opening credits, we see a typical supermarket scene that uses classic pictures of farms and fresh air. This uses appeals to tradition. The film is later contradicted with scenes from a chicken coop that practiced harsh and cruel actions on chickens. The purpose of these contradicting scenes are to shows the consumers the contrast between what is marketed vs reality and truth. The information is implied in this documentary with the intent to open the consumer’s eyes to the truth. Other harsh scenes are presented with dark, ominous music scores to set the tone and mood.

When we are introduced to Kevin’s mom, the film uses appeal to emotion. The tone of the film shifts slightly different depth of emotion. Images of Kevin flash across the screen with a narration of his story. This also uses course of action because of the laws and bills that Kevin’s mom tried to get passed. She made sure to take these issues to legislation and get more officials who had more power to change the food industry which allowed for more publicity to make it a public movement, requiring a bigger crowd of action. It was meant to support the claims of unsanitary, harsh conditions supported by the meat industry. This related back to the purpose of the film that opens the consumers’ eyes to the dangers and sketchy-ness of the origin of meat product.

The film shows how much of an impact the general public has on controlling the food industry by sharing the history of fast food. They use upbeat music and images that display the typical “American Way”. This uses populum and appeal to emotion. Once we had been set up to understand our impact on American food culture, we are taken inside of the industry again, similarly in-depth like the meat industry with dairy and produce. This is done with the rhetorical device of course of action. This showed us the recent demand for Organic dairy and produce. We are introduced to a farmer who worked at a dairy to produce organic products for Walmart, explaining that their consumers had demanded a wide variety of yogurt; so more had been produced to be put on shelves. This was done by using course of action (explaining the demand and showing the fulfillment of the demand) and claim of reality (showing the industries for what they really are and how they operate)

Food Inc used many strategies to achieve its purpose including ad populum, course of action, appeal to emotion, claim of reality and many more. The purpose of Food Inc. was achieved by showing the consumers the truth of the food industry, the source of food and buying power of the consumers.  (542)