Our Daily Bread

The town I live in hosts an annual film festival. They always show some political films and one of this year's was Our Daily Bread. A purely visual movie, it takes you through factory farming of produce and animals.

Some of the factory produce farming was really cool actually, I'm not going to lie. Some of it was disturbing, like seeing the pesticide sprayers decked out head-to-toe in hazmat suits, then seeing immigrants picking produce in t-shirts and shorts. Or seeing a beautiful field of sunflowers sprayed with something to kill them, then they were harvested for their seeds (seriously,the field was black). But the most disgusting thing was seeing how the animals were treated.

I won't go into specifics. I'm not a vegetarian and am completely aware that by being an omnivore I am killing a being so I can eat it. But I've basically made the move to buying as much as I can organic, and as much of that as local as possible. I even bought 1/4 of a lamb and 1/2 a cow this year from local farmers. I've met the people who are taking care of the animals (the woman I bought the lamb from hadn't even tried any yet because she just couldn't bring herself to eat it yet after taking care of them). I know the animal products I'm eating come from animals that are treated differently than I saw in the movie.

So then it made me think about a few things:
If we didn't raise animals that way, they'd be more expensive, and then only wealthier people could afford to eat it. It would be a special occasion dish for others. But is that so bad? I then thought about the fact that before I bought my shares of lamb and beef, I rarely ate meat at home because what I prefer to buy is more expensive.

Anyway, those are just some of the thoughts I had on this film. Has anyone else seen it? How do you feel about these issues?