Original subtitles

(upbeat music)

Here at this quaint little butcher shop

in the Netherlands,

Chef is preparing a worldwide fast food favorite:

fries, coleslaw, and golden fried chicken nuggets.

They're easy to take for granted but the seemingly humble

chicken nugget is anything but.

These shape shifting pieces of salty, fatty,

reconstituted deliciousness are an example of everything

that industrial food has sought to achieve

over the past 200 years.

(upbeat music)

The farms, factories, and processing plants of today

produce food like this en masse

and distributed across the world.

But this particular nugget holds a secret

that may just change the entire system that created it.

This is the story of the industry of food.

(upbeat music)

For thousands of years after its invention,

farming and agriculture remained fundamentally the same.

Most families lived off their own land

cultivating their own gardens

and raising their own livestock.

A typical family dinner.

Homemade bread,

preserved vegetables from this year's harvest,

freshly slaughtered beef from the farmer over yonder,

and potatoes from the root cellar.

But the modern world was on its way

and things began to develop at an unprecedented pace.

(energetic music)

Steamboats and railroads began to speedily transport

new foods fresh over previously unfathomable distances.

Until then, food had to be consumed relatively close

to its source.

And a steam driven transportation revolutionizes the global

distribution of food.

(energetic music)

These innovations culminated in an event

that would become known as the Industrial Revolution.

The world and our dinners would never be the same.

Industrialization created food for the masses.

Industrial food is a food that is relatively inexpensive.

It's created to appeal to a very broad range of palates.

It's created to last a long time and be easy to ship.

In the 200 or so years

since the Industrial Revolution's splattered to life,

humans have undergone major shifts in diets, demographics,

and seen the emerging domination

of processed industrial foods.

Processed products began to flood the American market

as the corporate giants today took their first steps.

Soup was sold in tin cans from huge factories

and the mass production of milk chocolate

meant everyone could enjoy a cheap and tasty treat.

Hot dogs became a huge hit on Coney Island.

Our love of processed meats was born.

And James L. Kraft received a patent

for the first processed cheese.

Processed foods were promoted as modern,

sanitary, and economical.

People ate it up.

The Roaring Twenties was a time of new money,

new music, and new food.

The elite vacationing in the casinos of Tijuana

brought home a culinary sensation.

It became the emperor of all salads.

The Caesar.

Prohibition didn't stop this sensational salad

from being paired with a dry gin martini and champagne.

But a sweet and legal alternative really began to pop.

Soft drinks didn't really become ingrained

in American culture until prohibition.

When people couldn't drink alcohol legally

and needed a substitute.

The 1930s were hit by the Great Depression.

This was the era of the soup kitchen.

Cheap eats to find the decade and meals like meatloaf

and ketchup soup were dinner time staples.

But a world shattering event

was about to alter our food forever.

The troops advanced

with the river and smokescreen behind them.

The 1940s were dominated

by World War II and rationing.

U.S. food shoppers had to be educated

all over again.

Reams of written material and posters told them

how to choose foods for their table that were plentiful

and still nutritious.

It had a hugely influential effect

on the trajectory of industrialized food.

It often took the background of a certified

public accountant to juggle points and products.

The kind of industrialized food system that we have today

really didn't start until after the second World War.

What happened during the second World War

was this enormous effort to produce food for troops overseas

and to get that food to where the troops needed it.

This company operates a plant as complete

and self-contained as a factory can be made.

Look at the cans going through this line with the zip

of machine gun bullets.

That meant that we had to develop a transportation system

and that was when we developed all of the highways

across America, the trucking systems,

the refrigerated systems.

That was when New Yorkers were lucky enough

to start eating foods from California.

Women in the post war world

were beginning to enter the workforce.

And mom needed to find a cheap and easy solution

for family dinner.

(upbeat music)

Jello molds filled with tuna, marshmallows,

and other processed foods were the center of the table.

Jello was packed with protein and it was an easy way

to stretch out leftovers.

(upbeat music)

The '40s also marked the big shift

in the way we farmed our foods.

We see a transition toward a kind of farming

that relies on tractors, and pesticides, and herbicides,

and seeds that grow really well

in that world of those chemicals.

(upbeat music)

The use of chemical fertilizers

and plant hybridization has seen the production of crops

like wheat and corn triple.

By the time the '50s rolled around,

the population and the economy were booming.

And corn began to appear on our plates in more ways

than the cob.

The production is generally concentrated

in the big corn razing areas of the country.

The trend is towards scientific feeding in the large scale.

The astonishing advent of television dominated

the culture and food convenience was becoming king.

This all came together in a family favorite

of the 1950s, the TV dinner.

A popular meal for the family.

How about some turkey and gravy?

Defrosted garden vegetables and mashed potatoes

with dehydrated milk.

As appetizing as frozen dinners were,

the '50s were really defined by the restaurants

that got their starts.

The era of fast food was beginning.

Fast food started out with one store

and now there are thousands.

And they were able to design a production system

at a quality that people liked that could be sold

at very low cost and delivered very quickly.

And that's a formula that has lasted a very long time.

I remember when I was a teenager,

we used to love to go to fast food places and hang out.

It was cheap; we could afford it.

It was fun; we loved the way it tasted.

And what's wrong with that?

Restaurants took an assembly line approach

to the kitchen.

And its success spawned a legion of imitators.

The race was on for the hearts

and stomachs of the American people.

This was fast food and you had to keep up.

(upbeat music)

In the '60s fast food chains continued to expand.

And fast food's quest for uniformity and cheapness

warped the entire supply chain.

The entire food system has consolidated.

So there are only a few companies that sell us meat,

sell us chicken, sell us sodas, sell us packaged goods.

That's just the way America works.

You consolidate, you want highly efficient

production systems with the entire purpose of it

being to keep the cost of food as low as possible.

That means you can afford to eat a lot of it.

And we do.

(upbeat music)

In the 1970s,

a resistance to big cheap eats began to take root.

With the advent of California cuisine,

chefs began to champion organic, local, and fresh foods.

The farm to table movement had appeared on the scene.

But there was no stopping fast food.

It became the pinnacle of industrial and processed foods.

In its wake, diets, farming, the supply chain,

and the lives of animals were changed forever.

Meat became cheap.

Historically reserved for special occasions,

people could now afford to eat meat three times a day.

But what were the repercussions of this titanic shift?

(birds chirping)

Polyface Farms in Virginia is a holdout

from an almost bygone era.

So we move them everyday to a new spot.

To mimic the kind of migratory choreography

of herbivores throughout history.

It's old grazing techniques with very modern technology.

This is a perfect blend of old and new.

Let me get them moved here before they get discouraged.

All right.

Come on honey pots, (hoots), come on gals.

(mooing)

Joel Salatin farms to produce meat.

But the lives of these cows is in stark contrast

to the fate of bovines in large industrial facilities.

My bottom line take on the modern industrial orthodox

food system is that it looks at life as fundamentally

mechanical rather than biological.

We as a culture, we simply ask how can we grow a plant

or an animal fatter, faster, bigger, cheaper.

We don't ask how to increase its nutrition,

it's immunological function.

How do we make an animal happier?

Okay.

We have a centralized system that's primarily mechanical

and views food as inanimate protoplasm.

And we view food completely different.

We view food as fundamentally biological.

It's living.

It's life.

Animals in massive feed lots are predominantly

fed corn and soy beans to fatten them quickly

for slaughter and distribution.

A culture is defined by its religion, it's architecture,

and its food.

What do you think about food culture in the U.S.?

It's fast food.

(chuckles)

That is almost an anti-culture.

To say that food and food which is life should simply

be viewed as a pit stop between

the important things in life.

As opposed to being important in and of itself.

(mooing)

Our mission statement is to develop agricultural prototypes

that are environmentally, economically,

and emotionally enhancing,

and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.

Most of us have no idea where our meats

and vegetables come from.

Americans eat avocados from Mexico

or cherries from Chile year round.

Regardless of distance or season.

In the U.S., just eight percent of farms market

and sell their food locally.

Historically, a society or community that couldn't

feed itself was very vulnerable.

So the idea of localization is, I think,

as much a kind of a community security issue

as much as anything.

As a result of the rapidly changing societies,

technologies, and appetites of the 20th century,

our local supermarket or restaurant has replaced the field

as provider of personal sustenance.

The number of farmers are so small that we've become

extremely disconnected from our food.

Here's the deal, you can't pull people out of participation.

You can't pull farmers out of the food system

and expect integrity to occur.

The only way you can have integrity

is to have people involved.

The disconnect between farms and our food

coincided with a range of problems.

From the '50s to the '70s, cardiovascular disease

have become endemic in burger chomping Western society.

In 1977, the U.S. government released a warning

against the dangers of red meat.

Cholesterol was starting to be discussed.

Sales were falling and the fast food industry was forced

to come up with a new strategy.

A crispy golden delight

was about to take the fast food industry by storm.

The chicken nugget.

Chicken nuggets are a way of using byproducts

of chicken production.

And the person who invented them was somebody

who was promoting the poultry industry in the United States.

He got the idea that if you took all these byproducts

and ground them up and put them together you could make

them look like chicken and they could be sold very cheaply.

Hence, chicken nuggets.

In 1983, the chicken nugget was introduced

to restaurants across the U.S.

They were an instant hit

and the fate of the chicken was sealed.

Chicken is the most popular meat in the U.S.

Today, chicken comes from huge industrial farms.

Where chickens never see the light of day.

They now grow twice as big as they did 50 years ago.

The difference between we raise chickens

and the way the industry raises chickens,

our chickens are outside in fresh grass,

they've got fresh air, sunshine.

Those are all things that are denied to the factory chicken.

(rooster crows)

And of course this is a problem and why the industry

has had to use so many antibiotics to keep them healthy.

Because of the overload of toxicity in that environment.

When it comes to the processing,

we process right here on sight on the farm as opposed

to a centralized processing facility so that the same person

who raised the chicken is also to participate

in its sacrifice and we think that that's pretty critical

in maintaining a spiritual and emotional balance.

Nobody should kill animals everyday.

We're gonna kill animals but we're gonna intersperse that

with a lot of time devoted to the life of the same animal.

In 2017, almost nine billion chickens

and 41 billion pounds of chicken products were produced

for the U.S. market.

They were fed on 1.2 billion bushels of corn

and more than 500 million bushels of soybeans.

You know, there's an old Chinese saying that says

if you keep going the way you're going

you're gonna end up where you're headed.

And the current system is absolutely not sustainable

over the long term.

It takes way too much energy.

The average morsel of food is shipped 1500 miles.

The only reason that works is because energy is cheap.

You can't continue to deplete the commons faster

than they're being replenished.

Over time, water will run out, soil will run out,

chemicals will run out, you know, something will give.

But there are some

that see the industrial system as an opportunity.

I want to be the biggest butcher in the world.

(upbeat music)

Sausages, meatballs, and chicken nuggets

line the shelves of Jaap Korteweg's

boutique butcher shop with a difference.

Every item is vegetarian.

I'm a vegetarian butcher.

I grew up on a farm.

I'm nine generation farmer.

And I start this company 10 years ago.

Because I was a big meat lover.

In the 90s,

Jaap witnessed the outbreak of swine flu

and mad cow disease in the factory farms of Holland.

The tragedy of the animals' death and the needless

destruction convinced him that there must be a better way.

I'm not happy with the way we treat animals.

We use animals for meat products.

And I started thinking about factory farm.

What is it?

We use animals as machines.

We feed them with beans and wheat to make meat.

But we don't need them any longer.

We developed a machine where we can out the feed

that we feed the animals in and we get very tasty,

juicy, plant-based meat.

The thing is that a lot of people love meat.

We're not against meat, only the way we produce it.

So I started a small vegetarian butcher shop with chefs

and meat specialists to develop products

with the same experience as meat.

As a chef, the first thing is the taste and the look

has to be incredible.

It has to be the same as the thing we are copying.

It looks like a chicken nugget.

It tastes like a chicken nugget.

But guess what?

It's only made from plant-based materials.

If you sell them in a fast food restaurant,

people don't tell the difference.

A vegetarian butcher is all about comfort food.

Everybody thinks vegan or vegetarian food is boring.

You only have tofu and falafel.

No, you have also the vegetarian meats so you can make

a really nice burger.

You can make chicken nuggets with sausage and sage oil.

Yeah, name it.

You can make everything but then plant-based.

The vegetarian butcher

has worked with food scientists to use soybeans

and lupin seeds to recreate the tastes

and textures people love and no one seems to be the wiser.

In Holland we eat a lot of meatballs.

We are compared in a meatball competition

with a big newspaper in Holland.

There were 40 contestants and we came in third.

So there were nine real butchers in the jury

and they didn't have a clue it was vegetarian.

With that meatball we show off.

You can easily fool people but that's not what I want to do.

I want to give the meat eaters the option, hey,

you can also eat vegetarian meat and yeah,

just let the animal be the animal.

(inspiring music)

Since starting out at this small concept store

10 years ago, the vegetarian butcher's products are now sold

in over 4,000 outlets in 15 countries.

But Jaap wants more.

Now it's growing very fast and well,

there's a lot of interest from big meat companies

all over the world to work together with us.

I think it's important to take it to an industrial level

because the meat market worldwide is very big.

I don't have problems with industrial, with large scale.

Jaab is embracing the industrial food system

to change it from within.

We want to go as far as possible.

People can buy the products from their butcher.

They can buy by the retailer.

They can buy by the wholesaler.

I hope that they can buy by the fast food chains.

If it's possible we can work with them we do it

because I want to have impact.

I want to change the meat production worldwide.

That's only possible if you think big.

It's not only the lives of animals

that have changed with the industrial production process.

Our diets have changed.

And it's not just what we eat.

It's how much.

In the 20th century,

global population increases roughly by a factor of four.

Which is amazing.

Nothing like that as far as we know had ever happened

in the history of the world.

But consumption per capita increases by a factor

of nearly 20 in the same time.

That's what really drives the growth of food production

in the 20th century.

The modern system feeds us

more than we could ever need.

And we embraced it with open minds and open mouths.

Obesity is a really important health problem in America.

Roughly two thirds of Americans are overweight.

We over-produce food in this country.

The food industry is produced convenience.

Extraordinary convenience but what they've done is create

a system that encourages us to eat too much too often.

And of the wrong kinds of foods.

The system has been set up to produce sweet,

salty, fatty foods for a simple reason.

They make money.

It's not like the head of the soft drink company

is like rubbing their hands hoping,

you know, wishing a childhood obesity epidemic.

They have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders

for quarterly profits.

Produce, fruits and vegetables, are perishable.

They go bad.

They're not very profitable.

There's no market.

They're not branded.

I mean, the system is just set up to reward

the most profitable foods and unfortunately,

profitability and health actually are at odds.

The same evolutionary drive

that calorie rich foods that helped us evolve

is now threatening our lives.

The reason we should care about nutrition

is because the global burden of disease today,

that's the largest study of human risk factors for disease

in history found that the number one cause of death

in the United States was our diet.

The number one cause of disability in the United States

was our diet.

The food choices we make decide our health.

You have tremendous power over our health,

and destiny, and longevity.

The vast majority of premature death and disability

is preventable with a healthy enough plant-based diet

and other lifestyle changes.

It just takes this acknowledgement.

Just getting this information out there

and then people will make better decisions

because they want to be healthy.

The industrialization of food shaped the way

we ate for the last century but it also contributes to many

of the biggest environmental challenges we face today.

It's not like good food is a panacea for wellness, okay?

But my goodness, it's one of the most controllable things

that we could do.

(exciting music)

Our little moniker is healing the land one bite at a time.

We want people to understand that how you choose

to eat today creates the landscape

your grandchildren will inherit.

And so it's about regeneration not just sustaining what is.

Even though our diets are wreaking havoc

on our environment and our health,

there is hope for the future of food.

(upbeat music)

New businesses and technologies are already jostling

to be the leaders of the next food revolution.

Will the future be meat grown in Petri dishes?

Urban organic farming?

Or all vegan diets?

What will be the future of food?

(uplifting music)