Morison had been holding down a second job as executive director of the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance. Kenner's desire to lift the company-ordered blackout on chicken barns delighted her. So did the film's attempt to shed light on contemporary agriculture as a whole. Morison says, "A lot of things [in this industry] are hurting people, and it's about time it got straightened out. Antibiotics, for example, have been overused in poultry. They're not just given to chickens when they get sick. Chickens live a very short life - from a newly hatched chick, you get a 5 1/2-pound chicken in seven weeks. They don't even live long enough to utilize antibiotics, so constant feeding is ridiculous, and the overuse has caused problems in human treatment." Morison herself has become allergic to antibiotics.
Food, Inc. potently depicts man's inhumanity to man - and to animals. By the time Kenner came calling on her, Morison had had her fill of agricultural brutality. "A farmer shouldn't kill animals just because they don't look right," she says, or because they'd don't conform to the others in the flock. What a farmer should do, says Kenner, "is put down an animal if it is suffering."
But to deliver tens of thousands of chickens that fit the heavy-breasted 5 1/2-pound profile, chicken growers must "cull out the unthrifty ones, according to this industrial process ... it's mass production, not farming."
The chickens that fit the required form still spend a brief, wretched time on the farm. "They live their short lives miserably, in less than a square foot of living space per chicken, on top of their own droppings. To me that's kind of yuck." Even if they did have room to move, they couldn't: Their bones and internal organs haven't kept pace with the growth of their industrially bred meat.
When Morison refused to "upgrade" her screened chicken barns into completely blackened enclosures that required "tunnel ventilation," Perdue canceled her contract. She says the company also charged her with breaching biosecurity regulations when she allowed Kenner and his crew on her farm without signing them into a company-issued logbook. Morison considers this practice ridiculously insulting to Perdue's farmer partners, who "know how to prevent disease and how to tell where it comes from." She also notes that bringing her grandson to see her baby chicks didn't raise a peep from her employer.
Morison is now working with farmers throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed for the Socially Responsible Agricultural Project. This nonprofit enterprise aims to create methods of raising, distributing and marketing food that will be locally based, organic, compassionate and efficient. "Raising food the way it used to be raised, but with some innovations," Carole says.
Raising food, Kenner adds, "that actually fits the pictures on the packages."
