Corruption In Food Industry

When people think about the American food industry a variety of thoughts and words come into mind. Some of these thoughts include the words healthy, wealthy, supply, “junk food”, frozen food, soda and so on but one thing that not many think about is corruption. In fact, most Americans do not know that the American food industry is one of the most corrupt entities of business in the world. Americans do not tie corruption with the food industry due to the fact that this corruption is not public and often occurs under the surface. According to Mitchell Johnson from the Huffington Post, food corporations unlike other corrupt entities, such as FIFA and SwissAir, are often not caught in major scandals which allows their corruption to go unnoticed.
These three companies often pay off politicians and health organizations in order to sell their product or approve a new cheaper product. Due to this, documentaries such as Food Inc. (2008) and Fed Up (2014) have recently brought attention to this topic. In Food Inc. (2008), director Robert Kenner exposes the nation's food industry, showing the highly corrupt mechanized industry that has been hidden from American consumers with the consent of government agencies, such as the USDA and FDA. The documentary also shows how the nation's food supply is controlled by corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health and safety. Director Stephanie Soechtig uses a different approach to her documentary Fed Up (2014). Soechtig examines America’s obesity epidemic and how the food industry plays a major role in aggravating it. The documentary shows personal accounts of individuals currently obese throughout the United States and studies how the food industry pays off politicians and health organizations to increase the amount of products they
This act authorized the USDA to come up with new standards for the federally funded school lunch program eliminating pizza from school. When this act was passed the Schwan Food Company, a $3 billion private company, which accounts for 70% of the pizza market in U.S school lunches, protested. The company could not have pizza eliminated from schools, so their senator in Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, wrote a letter to the Department of Agriculture to protect frozen pizza’s in school. The letter stated that tomato paste contributed to dietary fiber and should not be eliminated. The effect of was to count a slice of pizza as a vegetable thus allowing pizza’s to remain in school lunches (Fed