out from under the rock...

i saw food inc today. judging by the murmurs of my movie mates, there was much revealed that was shocking. but, not so for me.

i don't have an agrarian background, but i come from a blue collar family. my dad worked 30 plus years for the railroad, and a year after he died, we won a class action suit against the railroad. my dad was a brakeman and he climbed around the cars for his whole shift... there were no covers on the cars pulling lead. that means that he had a few decades of lead poisoning--him and a few hundred other men. my dad suffered the most dramatic effects and was therefore the lead case.

he never saw the case settled because he died the year before from lung cancer at the age of 59. i was there with him and watched him die. he started smoking as a barely teen and smoked until he couldn't even hold the cigarette in his hands. though he only had days to live and it no longer mattered, i just couldn't help him smoke no matter how much he pleaded.

what does this have to do with food inc? this movie is not a surprise. we have suffered the tobacco lies, seen the results of the love canal, and recently, learned a good deal about the gas companies (see Gashole if you haven't).

everyone should read upton sinclair's the jungle and george orwell's the road to wigan pier. it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to consider the theories of the disappearance of the hopewell indians (the huge indian civilization that lived at the cahokia mounds). one theory of their demise is a diet based too much on corn.

among my peers this evening there was often a surprising level of amazement about the what was on the screen. it is at times like this when i'm grateful for my natural curiosity and ability to temper information and facts from many sources. yes, i did learn a lot tonight. i'll not claim i knew it all beforehand. instead of it being all new information, i was filling in some holes and developing new questions.

even when we don't think we do, we do have choices. we just need to stick our heads out from under the rock and look around and question, question, question.