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Some 25 years ago I accompanied my parents on a trip to a 600-acre farm in Central Illinois that my mother had inherited from her sister. It was a beautiful, bucolic property, mostly planted in corn, with a small hog operation where some of the animals were actually milling about in the barnyard.

I imagine it's long gone now. Small hog farms have given way to huge corporate hog factories, where a single football-field-size hog house can contain 1,000 hogs in pens too narrow for the animal even to turn around. Larger operations have 10,000 or more hogs on a single "farm," all of them overseen by "integrators" - mega-companies that control the production and distribution of pork from conception to the dinner table.

All this and more are disturbingly documented in Food, Inc., a film playing in selected movie theaters that every American ought to be required to see. It illustrates in graphic detail why it is cheaper for a family to load up on corn-fed and fructose-laden food than on fresh fruit and vegetables.

In one scene, mom and dad and their two children stop by McDonald's on the way to work and school to order burgers and soft drinks. In another scene, they are shopping at the local food mart. Mom inspects a bag of carrots, then puts it back. "Too expensive," she says.

Dad, meanwhile, is a diabetic. The family has trouble paying for his medication.

In a word, the industrialization and privatization of the food chain is Big. As in big business. Big profits. Big people. Big problems.

The logic is impeccable, if perverse. Agricultural subsidies promote the consolidation, standardization and relentless promotion of "product." Efficiencies gained from size and integration of production make it possible to deliver the product at a price affordable to consumers, who are seduced, cajoled, and otherwise incented to load up on it.

Over time, consumers become what they consume: fat, oversized and chemically altered. They develop chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and some cancers. These diseases, in turn, require a multitude of other interventions and products -- primarily drugs and medical procedures -- to treat and manage. This generates huge profits for the medical industry, thus completing the circle.

From big food to big medicine. It starts and ends with big business. Perfect.

Imagine you were an alien from outer space who came down to visit the U.S. and went back to your planet's leaders to explain what was going on. "Well," you might say. "They have this really weird system. Mostly they produce stuff to make everyone sick, then they produce stuff to make them well."

"That is weird," your wise and all-knowing leader might concur. "Why don't they just stop producing stuff that makes people sick in the first place?"

You shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s because they haven’t figured out a way to make any money keeping people well.”

That pretty much sums it up, I think. We’re invested in insanity. The GDP depends on it.

As it turned out, my wife and I had a reservation for dinner at a nice restaurant after we saw Food, Inc. For sure I wasn’t ordering pork or beef. Salmon was out after learning most of that species were being farm-raised, fed pellets of corn meal and chicken feces, and had chemicals added to give them color.

Chicken was equally as repugnant, especially after watching scenes from a monster-size chicken farm where the corn-fed chickens were too heavy to stand upright without immediately falling face forward in their own feces. I settled on some kind of mushroom concoction, but even that was lathered with cheese (which I dearly love, unfortunately). I had a tomato and mozzarella salad to start, and the “heirloom” tomato had a bland taste and the consistency of cardboard.

The pre-dinner martini, however, was excellent. It made me wonder why I hadn’t gone back home after the movie, had several of them, munched on some arugula, and reflected on just how we have managed to find ourselves in this bizarre state of affairs in the first place.

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*The Drift reflects the views of the author, and does not represent the official view of SLHI's Board of Trustees and staff.