Netflix's 'Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food' spotlights the need for reforms

Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food, a new documentary from filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig, begins in a setting we all probably frequent on at least a weekly basis: the grocery store. At the start of the film, Soechtig—director of docs like Fed Up (2014) and The Devil We Know (2018)—walks into frame beside a man gesturing toward the produce section.

"You know we're told," he says, "to eat healthy, to sort of shop the perimeters of the grocery stores, but I think what a lot of people don't realize is this also may be the riskiest [of] areas."

The bearer of this alarming news is Bill Marler, a food safety lawyer who has spent decades advocating on behalf of consumers who've gotten sick—or worse—eating foods that most shoppers wouldn't think twice about buying, unless they've watched this film.

Poisoned isn't just another documentary about the health impacts of eating foods that have been loaded with chemicals or drinking sugary drinks. This film is about the all-too-real—and acutely American—risk of accidentally eating food that has been contaminated with some kind of harmful pathogen—usually a bacteria.

At least with sugar and preservatives, there's research we can do ahead of time about the brands we choose to buy. We can even simply check the nutritional information and the ingredients on the back of the packaging before putting it in the cart. 

But there's no way to know, just by looking at food, whether it's safe to eat, or whether it contains these harmful pathogens. That's what made Poisoned such a troubling watch. Soechtig masterfully juxtaposes these dangers with the government's long-held, frequently espoused narrative that "America has the safest food supply in the world."

For careful and health-conscious eaters, Poisoned is nothing short of an hour and twenty minutes' worth of nightmare fuel. For animal rights activists, it's a reminder of how many intersections our movement shares with others, just from a slightly different vantage point.

Animal-borne germs can end up on our fruits and veggies

Today, if there's a large-scale recall because a product's been contaminated with some sort of bacteria, it likely involves romaine lettuce or another leafy green vegetable. But how does an "innocent" vegetable end up becoming a vector for harmful pathogens? The answer, the documentary shows, often leads back to the factory farming industry and its proximity to produce.

Take E. coli, for example. E. coli bacteria live in the guts of warm-blooded animals, including cows and pigs. Many types are completely harmless. But a few strains, such as E. coli O157 can cause severe—even fatal—illness. On an industrial-sized cow farm, this dangerous pathogen can travel from the animals' manure and into the water that's used to water nearby crops.

"How we raise animals can fuel the growth of these bugs," Lance Prince, an environmental health microbiologist interviewed in the movie explains. "So if we crowd the animals together, and you have one that's carrying a really bad pathogen like E. coli O157, then they can poop those bacteria out. And then, the [feces] from the cattle washes off into the streams or into irrigation canals, and then those can be used to water these plants. You have this distribution system for these pathogens from animals to produce."

Because Poisoned is focused on food safety in particular, the film doesn't delve too deeply into the broader dangers posed by factory farming. But beyond contaminating produce, there are plenty of ways the factory farming industry poses severe, yet preventable, environmental and health risks to animals and humans alike.

As I've written about before for The Humane League, crowding together extremely stressed animals into confined, sordid spaces is effectively streamlining the conditions necessary for the next pandemic. In a recent editorial, I dig deeper specifically into the connections factory farming has to the ongoing, global outbreak of avian influenza—a key public health concern.

The list of problems doesn't end there. Not by a long shot. Sometimes referred to as "the silent pandemic," the world is experiencing a growing phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance. This is the term scientists have coined for germs like bacteria and fungi adapting to become immune to drugs that were once effective in killing them.

You may have been prescribed an antibiotic by a doctor if you've had a respiratory infection or skin condition. But farmed animals receive them far more than we do. According to the National Resources Defense Council in 2020, cows and pigs receive more antibiotic medicine than humans by about 44%.

The overuse of antibiotics on farms is "unraveling" our ability to treat infections in humans. Even those that were once considered minor—treatable—inconveniences, scientists say, could become "death sentences" in the near future.

A more direct route for pathogens

Of course, animal-borne pathogens don't just travel into people's kitchens within the leaves of vegetables. They can also taint the meat products of the animals themselves. Poisoned chronicles a particularly bad E. coli hamburger outbreak—one of the most infamous scandals in the history of the fast food industry. The saga began in 1993 in the state of Washington, where young children were taken to hospitals in droves. Within days, public health officials discovered that all of these children—being treated for an infection of E. coli O157—had recently eaten at burger chain Jack-in-the-Box. In the most severe cases, hospitalized children were developing a condition known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which occurs when the particular E. coli strain—which produces Shiga toxins—affects the red blood cells, leading to kidney failure.

By the end of the ordeal, several hundreds of people had been hospitalized and four children had died.

Jack-in-the-Box swiftly pointed the finger at its supplier Vons Companies for selling its stores tainted meat. As the documentary explains, the contamination had occurred before the ground beef reached either the supplier or the restaurant locations. The meat was really destined to be contaminated from the moment the animals walked into the slaughterhouses.

Slaughterhouses of horror

When industrially farmed cows and pigs are brought to facilities to be slaughtered, they can bring pathogens like E. coli with them through fecal matter that may have collected on their hooves or hides. Especially with products like ground beef, it only takes one infected animal to spoil a whole lot of product.

"Hamburger, sometimes, is the result of mixing meat from as many as 400 animals. Kind of awful to think about," says Marion Nestle, a food policy writer interviewed in Poisoned. "If one of those animals has this toxic form of E. coli, you're in trouble."

That information alone might be enough to turn many peoples' stomachs. But that's only the first layer of horrors that occur in slaughterhouses.

The documentary doesn't deal too much with how animals get slaughtered, but it's an important piece to this conversation. Most large animals are slaughtered through a process called exsanguination, a process in which major blood vessels in the neck or chest are cut to slowly drain the animal of his blood. Countless cattle, pigs, sheep, and other "livestock" have been subjected to abhorrently inhumane forms of slaughter, in which they bleed to death, or get dismembered, sometimes—if stunning is ineffective—while still conscious.

Even approaches which have been touted as humane are prone to failure. Methods designed to to improve welfare at slaughter—such as captive bolt, electric stunning systems, and gas stunning systems—can fail if not properly maintained or operated. This may be particularly true of manually operated methods, where workers can tire. In electrical stunning systems, for example, birds are shackled upside-down, and some birds miss the electrified water bath altogether, leaving them to suffer painful deaths while still conscious.

There is a piece of legislation, known as the Humane Slaughter Act (HSA), which authorizes the USDA to enforce rules aimed at minimizing the stress and pain animals experience up until the moment they are killed. However, the act is rife with shortcomings. As found in a 2017 report by the Animal Welfare Institute, HSA enforcement varies dramatically from state-to-state, both federal and state inspectors have demonstrated an unfamiliarity with humane slaughter enforcement, and humane slaughter in general remains low on the USDA's list of priorities compared to other aspects of food safety enforcement.

Most glaring of all, HSA doesn't even extend to some of the most widely slaughtered animals in the world: chickens and fishes. The scientific evidence is clear that both are sentient and can feel pain, so their exclusion from any humane protections is simply inexcusable and unjustifiable.

Poultry farming remains stuck in the past

The 1993 Jack-in-the-Box fiasco led to fairly rapid action from the USDA to clamp down on the regulation of pathogens in ground beef. Pretty soon afterward, E. coli O157 was officially declared an adulterant in ground beef, making tainted beef illegal to sell. These efforts were successful insofar as the fact that E. coli outbreaks in beef remain rare today—though not unheard of.

Sadly, the same cannot be said for poultry products. The documentary explains that the USDA still takes the outdated, backwards position that it's the consumer's responsibility to cook bacteria like salmonella and campylobacter out of the meat the chicken industry sells.

"The fact of the matter is salmonella in chicken is okay to be sold. It's not [considered] an adulterant. So it's fine to knowingly sell salmonella-, campylobacter-tainted chicken," says Marler, who petitioned the USDA to ban 31 strains of salmonella from commerce. "There was a famous [1973] case where the government and industry simply said that it was the housewife's job to protect the family."

The documentary takes viewers within the walls of one of the country's largest chicken meat producers. By showing the methods used from hatching to packaging, Soechtig visually demonstrates the ways the poultry industry, as well as USDA regulators, fall short in keeping the public safe. But I couldn't help getting distracted by the blatant, heart-wrenching inhumanity of it all.

We see chicks, who have just moments ago hatched into the world, immediately thrust into the mechanized, heartless world of industrial meat production. The chicks are transported via a conveyor belt, tossed into crates, and brought to the farm where they will reach "market weight" in just 45 days. The documentary mentions this 45 day figure, but doesn't dig into just how unnatural that is.

Let's take a look below the tip of this iceberg. Farmed chickens are not given growth hormones. One, because this would not be cost-effective considering the sheer number of birds industrial farms raise every year. Two, because it's not allowed by the USDA. However, the poultry industry has still managed to make chickens grow as big as possible in as short a timespan as they can through diet and selective breeding. After decades of this practice, chickens now grow much bigger, much faster than they used to. In the 1920s, an average farmed chicken would grow to be 2.5 pounds after 112 days. Today, the average bird will hit 6.4 pounds—more than double the size—in less than half that time.

According to an article published in Poultry Science, the growth of modern chickens is comparable to that of a two-month-old human baby weighing 660 pounds.

This is a success story for the industry, but it means suffering for the birds, who, as result of this unnatural growth cycle, are prone to skeletal problems, heart attacks, circulatory disorders, and other health issues. The issue of food-borne illnesses and inhumane growth cycles for chickens may not seem related on their face. But they both arise out of the same, broken food system. It's a system in which both the commodified animals and the human consumers are exploited for the sake of maximizing profits.

Conclusion

Don’t expect Poisoned to be a fun watch, but a necessary, compelling one. I found it disturbing seeing how prevalent the risks of zoonotic infections are—even if consumers don’t eat meat. I found it heartbreaking, listening to the parents of young children who suffered life-threatening, even fatal illnesses all because they unknowingly ate contaminated food. I found it enraging watching industry leaders and government regulators dodge pointed questions and skirt any association of wrongdoing.

Perhaps, most of all, I found it enlightening to see the many places where food safety activism and animal rights activism are attempting to address the same issues from different angles. Big Food and Big Agriculture is hurting animals, humans, and the environment alike. To address any one of these issues, we need to address them all. And only through concerted, collective action sourced from a range of similar interests can we hope to make the changes we sorely need.

I hope people watch this documentary and learn something new about where their food comes from. But I hope it’s not the last one they watch, because it’s really just a piece of the puzzle.