Since its U.S. release last summer, several of my friends have begged me to watch “Food Inc.” — essentially challenging me to devote this column to it. Lying in bed late on Saturday night with my girlfriend’s Netflix account, I acquiesced.

The inspiring documentary by Robert Kenner — and Participant Media, the same people who brought you “An Inconvenient Truth” — jumped headlong into the corporate farming industry, showing people what they didn’t really want to know — but needed to hear.

It mystified me with its candid tapestry of vegetable libel laws, industrial seed manufacturing and meat production. How could things have gone so wrong? How on earth does one libel a vegetable? And why must Bessie stand ankle deep in her own feces?

I was disturbed, and there was only one solution to my restless sleep: wake up Sunday morning — let’s be honest, that means 11:30 a.m. — and go to McDonald’s.

The seductive smell of fat fryers, processed meat and high-fructose corn syrup pulled me through the doors and left me plump, dumb and happy for just a tad more than $4. Life was good, and I could now give an honest reflection on one of the film’s last — and most quotable — lines, “To eat well in this country costs more than to eat badly.”

The aphorism is right, I could certainly have gone out to the farmer’s market off Centennial — just minutes away from the McDonald’s on Western — and bought produce that was fresh, in-season and local. It would have cost more — perhaps twice or thrice as much — but would certainly have saved my arteries some pain and suffering.

So I asked myself: what is my health worth? What is Bessie’s standard of living worth? What is the cost of not doing anything?

The truth is that sugar should come from a cane, not a kernel; steer should eat grass, not corn feed; and cloned seeds make about as much sense as cloned people.

We should be vilifying farmers who put steroids in their cows and chickens — and the companies who force them into the practice — the same way we scorn baseball players who use human growth hormone.

Monsanto, Perdue, Smithfield, Cargill and Tyson, along with hundreds of other corporations, are making Americans overweight at disgusting, and unethical, rates.

They don’t physically force people to consume processed sugars and meat, but they’ve made it the only viable option for millions of people through the affordability of their products and those products proliferation through the marketplace.

It’s not even about the environmental impact or sustainability; this is a public health crisis. Companies, under the watch — or lack thereof — of the federal government are essentially forcing Americans to supersize themselves with the control they have over the food we eat. Is the bottom line really worth it?

Collectively, we’ll have to pay trillions in public health bills so that a few multinationals become fabulously rich. It’s not right, and it has to stop today.

Paying more in the short run for grass-fed meat, free-range eggs, steroid-free milk and local, in-season produce will make the populace healthier — the real solution to health care.

As I sat at McDonald’s and looked at the obesity around me, I realized I would happily pay $10 for the same $4 meal if the food was produced in such a way that it didn’t prematurely kill Americans from diabetes.

I’m not calling for the end of fast food and corporate food production — that’s blithely unrealistic. But it’s time policy makers — which includes all of us three times a day — issue an edict toward the end of deceptively inexpensive food. To let legislators know that obesity and a frail health care system are really symptoms of a broken food system.

Bessie should eat grass; food shouldn’t be synthesized in a lab; and Americans have a right to healthy lives.