The Gonzalez family is simply an average, lower middle class family, but their story is an excellent example of how the food industry exploits its consumers. The information about the Gonzalez’s lifestyles comes from the documentary Food Inc. The Gonzalez’s are an incredibly hard working family of four, as Maria, the mother, said, “we leave the house at six, and we don’t get home until nine, ten o clock at night” (Food Inc). Because of their long hours spent at work, coupled with their low wages, the family is bound to getting their meals through a drive through window, which is seriously affecting the health of the family.
This diet has led to numerous problems for the family, predominantly the declining health of the father, which is now undercut by type two diabetes. Contracting diabetes is a giant obstacle by itself, but it is also putting his family further and further into debt. According to Maria, her husband is on two types of medications, which costs the family 260 dollars a month, this costs digs a massive hole in their already small salary. As Maria put it, paying for the medication “takes a lot of our income away. We're really tight from either paying for his medicine to be healthy or buying vegetables to be healthy” (Food Inc). There is no real way to get out of this predicament; once they bought into the industrial food system, there was really no way to get out. For the Gonzalez, there is no way out of this unhealthy system because there only options are to either they stop paying for the father’s required medicine and start paying for better food, or continue buying cheap processed foods.
Gonzalez really does not have the option of discontinuing his medication; his case of diabetes is so severe that if he stopped taking his medicine he could go blind. If becoming blind is not a frightening enough option, Maria explains how that is even less of an option as her husband “is a truck driver by profession, and if he cannot see, he cannot drive, and if he loses his job, I do not know what we would do” (Food Inc). Considering that the family can barely afford the basic necessities to live know, if their primary income was lost, they would easily be rendered homeless.
This predicament is seriously affecting the health of not only the father, but of the whole family. Because the highly processed, unhealthy foods are so affordable, that is what the Gonzalez family has had to live off of. As Maria put it “when you have only a dollar to spend and you have two kids to feed, either you go to the market and try to find something that's cheap or just go straight through a drive-thru and get two small hamburgers for them and "Okay, here, eat them, this is what's going to fill her up, not that one single item at the market” (Food Inc). The two daughters, one a teenager and the other still in middle school, are wildly fascinated with the prospects of eating a healthy diet, grounded by fruits and vegetables, but the Gonzalez’s simply cannot afford this lifestyle. Because as Maria says “the broccoli is too expensive” and that the processed foods, especially “the sodas are real cheap” (Food Inc), she is not able to allow their interests in a healthy lifestyle grow as they cannot afford for their children to be healthy. Her youngest daughter is already rather overweight and is likely to have diabetes by her late teenage years, and so this industrial trap is set on another generation of Gonzalez’s.
It would be so nice to say that this family is an extraordinary case, but unfortunately it is far from the truth. Everyday people are getting hooked into this dependency for cheaply processed foods that are incredibly unhealthy. There are countless hardworking families like the Gonzalez family that simply do not have the money or time to eat a healthy and well balanced diet. After eating this way for a duration of time, not only are the people literally addicted (because of all of the added fat, sugar, and sodium), but they are also financially hooked into this way of life because of the medication required because of the related diseases. Then unfortunately the parents cannot meet the expense of teaching their kids how to eat well and a new generation is bound by the industrial food system. Once a less fortunate person gets into eating in this processed food landscape, there is no hope for them to regain a healthy lifestyle. This issue is going to take an army of support to correct, but unfortunately, only few are working toward a healthier future. Many doctors, scientists, nutritionists, and writers are fighting the current food system, but it is going to take so much more for serious change. Food producers have unlimited resources to lobby politicians, making legislation against processing foods an incredibly difficult process. This is why this issue needs the support of the general public, as the politicians need extreme pressure from voters to pass legislation against the processing of foods. In the end, lower income families like the Gonzalez’s need the voters to demand this legislation.
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