I watched the movie Food, Inc and recommend it to everyone who has even a passing interest in food or health. It was a riveting, and sometimes harrowing, documentary about the corporate involvement in our mass-production food system and arguably impacts everyone in the country. It covers a lot of familiar ground, stories you’ve likely heard bits and pieces of. But when the threads are carefully laid out, and the entire tapestry presented as a whole, the completed image is absolutely compelling.

What struck me while watching the movie was the faceless nature of the decision-making these corporations make. The practical problems of our food system results in some (for lack of a better term) evil decisions. The very term “large corporation” is virtually synonymous with a morality-bending, soul-crushing devotion to profit. But I immediately recalled some of the research from Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. In it, using a marketing perspective, he breaks down the psychology of human decision-making, exposing the rational weaknesses and bias we’re all subject to. In the book, it becomes increasingly clear that most people surprisingly don’t actually know what they want at all. We tend make decisions much as we would take a multiple choice exam: we look at the available options, apply some basic reasoning, and go with what we consider the best result. The problem with this is that it both assumes that the available choices are indeed the only choices (sometimes the test is rigged with favorable answers to someone’s agenda, or the best answers aren’t even shown) and that the practice of logically breaking down large decisions into smaller ones will always yield congruent results.

When you understand these concepts it becomes easy to understand how a series of good decisions can result in something absolutely terrible happening. I don’t think the problem of evil decisions is necessarily endemic to corporations, but rather the scale of the decision-making process they are forced to use exposes this fundamental flaw in human reasoning. But this is true of all decision-making on this scale, including mobs, governments, and even social groups. The only way to combat the ever-increasing manipulation of the Science of Influence is education and knowledge. Whether those corporations depicted in Food, Inc. inflict harm intentionally or not is a matter considerable speculation, just as whether or not corporations as a methodology of getting business done are inherently evil. The reality is that both are here to stay and clearly need some revisiting.

The natural reaction to watching a documentary like Food, Inc. is outrage, or as the movie supports, participating in your local markets and paying attention to what and where your money is going. Some people will always claim money is the root of all evil, but I think money can be used as a force for good. The movie’s message of civil activism though voting with your dollar is an richly empowering one. Money isn’t the root of all evil, money is really just the green leaves on a sick decision tree, who’s poorly-tended to roots lead to short-sighted and counter-productive growth. These roots need to be strengthened, so that they may support the heavy weight of very the real issues we face such as feeding and caring for our increasingly large society. There needs to be a rational public discourse regarding these archaic decision-making strategies and increased accountability for this type of unchecked and destructive reasoning. There needs to be corporate transparency and a realignment of common business and societal goals so that we, as a species, will end up living in a world that we chose, not one that we arrived at mistakenly though poorly considered action.