Why I root for the little guy in an industrialized society

I’ve been watching a few odds and ends in the Netflix instant watch queue this week [no] thanks to being too sick to climb up and down a ladder with a brush in hand. Just finished the documentary called Food, Inc.

The only way this really relates to this blog is that the documentary is about the industrialization of the food supply, and industrialization (or mass-production) is a recurring theme on The Aesthetic Elevator. It’s interesting to me mainly because I live largely on the opposite end of the spectrum, spending a lot of time creating one-of-a-kind objects, and because it never ceases to amaze me how we’re such eager adopters of new technology that we don’t stop and consider the ramifications of what we adopt — like 90% of soybean farmers planting one genetically modified soybean seed.

The film makes certain accusations against certain companies, and in the case of at least one company whose website I visited they attempted to refute those accusations. I’m generally very skeptical when it comes to such giant bureaucracies in the first place — they’ve largely earned the distrust I have for them.

One of the examples in Food, Inc. talks about chicken farming. Northwest Arkansas, our former stomping ground, is all about growing chickens. The parents of a friend had land with three or four chicken houses. They recently sold the place on account of the exact same complications described in Food, Inc. My friend who shared with me — about four years ago now — how the contracts with companies such as Tyson work could have been in the film. The farmers end up more like indentured servants than independent contractors.

Why should I accept the refutations of the companies in the film when I’ve seen first hand the claims of the film? I don’t want to be the kind of person that has a knee-jerk reaction to every bureaucracy, but they just keep shooting themselves in the foot.