Food, Inc.: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.
“It’s almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers,’ ”
– Robert Kenner, Director, “Food, inc.”
Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.
Michael Pollan narrates; Eric Schlosser is a co-producer; Robert Kenner directs.
As Mr. Kenner marshals his prodigious evidence, including bushels of statistics, a veritable village of talking heads and too many dopey graphics, he makes the case that there’s something horribly wrong with a system in which a bag of chips cost less than a bag of carrots. It’s such a good case that you soon realize there are a dozen more documentaries tucked inside this one.
[I]f “Food Inc.” comes off as a one-sided project, it’s easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film — Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto — universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.
On one hand, we’ve got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. “Food, Inc.” attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process.
“Food, Inc.” is part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces. It’s eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all.
“All we have are these little canisters of film, and we’re launching them at a fortress,” said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a filmmaker and farmer who is finishing a documentary on the young agrarian movement called “The Greenhorns.”
From Cinematical’s review:
Food, Inc. plays a bit like a greatest hits collection, looking briefly at all these issues and a few others. But the film’s bright, cheerful tone, colorful graphics and bite-sized snippets will hopefully appeal to larger crowd, thereby spreading this vital information to new areas.
Normally, I’m not that interested in how many people listen to a movie’s message, but in this case, the number of viewers of this film will be equivalent to the number of people who buy food, and their vote can begin to change things. Already we can see this happening, as the film indicates, when Wal-Mart begins carrying Stonyfield organic yogurt. That means the consumers proved that they wanted it, and the corporate giant responded.
Barbara Kowalcyk, whose 2-1/2 year old son went from being healthy to dead in a matter of days after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli, is interviewed for the film:
She since become a food safety advocate, traveling from office to office to meet with politicians and ask for their help. Barbara has probably told her story in countless office chairs and boardrooms and she tells it again, here, and it’s heartbreaking. Oddly, she’s not allowed to talk about the food item in question, or she can be sued. That’s the type of law currently in place protecting the food corporations and not the consumer. A farmer that grows regular soybeans is likewise threatened by the corporation that holds the patent for genetically altered soybeans. The farmer has to prove that he’s not using their beans, which — unless you have millions for slick lawyers — is pretty much impossible. (All his neighbors use the beans, and even if the wind blows some stray seed onto his property, he can be sued.)
Joel Salatin, who was introduced to Pollan readers in The Omnivore’s Dilema, is featured philosophizing about his organic farm. I’ve interviewed Joel, spent time with his pigs and have been known to give his plucked fresh chickens as house-warming gifts.
The Food, Inc. website, Hungry For Change. The trailer:
Michael Pollan and Robert Kenner talk about the film:
4 Responses to “Food, Inc.: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.”
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we just need to get serious about this. just because we had shoddy nutritional miseducation is no excuse to keep going down that dead end road.
Careful, careful, careful.
The last thing we need or want is not only a bizarre attack campaign on corporations forming “Big Food,” but to have government intervene and oppress us to satisfy the silly whims of what is in large part merely a regurgitation of Sixties activism, which we see in some metro area silly far-left playpen weeklies now, an insistence that we buy from more expensive local sources for food (often organic, or produced in other politically correct ways), or that governments promote this, and that we “punish” evil corporate Big Food and what the silly people also demonize, with punitive taxes and other measures directed against things like high fructose corn syrup, soft drinks, fast food, and (revealing their anti-tech and anti-progress nature when it doesn't suit their stupid polics) bans on genetically engineered food or on irradiated food, et cetera.
There is no “food crisis” [snicker] and there is no need for any totalitarian “food policy,” least of all featuring government intervention (particularly by Washington) or PC government mischief with food.
(Yes, we know the worst of the social engineers want not only “energy policy” that's PC, and the same for “food policy,” as well as “transportation policy” [PC vehicles] and even “thought” and “speech policy” [PC is leftist suppression of dissent, the more intelligent and moral, the more harshly], but this is wrong.)
I gardened when I was a kid and grew food crops (vegetables, fruits). What impresses me aren't these silly activists (who have no business convicing government to be lunatic and oppressive, or even merely paternalistic — it's not the place of government to tell us what or how to eat). I like the people in Detroit, for example, who have converted abandoned lots to gardens, many of them to stock food banks for the poor and homeless who are hungry. One guy, who was featured in a metro area weekly here, recovered first one abandoned lot for a garden, now is managing five, including one lot with an orchard — now that's success. Others are thinking of a larger experiment, a working farm that would even employ people and include a wind farm in addition to gardens and other related development. (This has drawn corporate attention, which means it has mainstream acceptance and even appeal, so the worst extremists are against the project, specifically because Evil Corporations are interested. This is also similar to a stance some idiots have in New England to a wind development project there. Their [latest] excuse is that it is private rather than a public [government] enterprise.) There is a need to demolish several abandoned and burned homes in Detroit (many in that state since 1967), and it's an obvious logical step from demolition to converting many more of these to local gardens. But it's an attractive proposition because it is useful and practical, not because it's inherently better than larger corporate operations, which are more efficient and give us cheaper and about as nutritious, albeit less delicious at times, food. There is nothing morally superior to going to closer, more expensive local sources. (Why don't you channel your excess emotion and other energy toward something constructive, and at least consider gardening and growing food crops yourselves instead?)
Those who are making food political (or as one stupid, childish person wrote in a metro weekly recently, “um, political”) — or are making environmental improvement political — can't they be and do better?
At least so far we haven't heard PC folks who abuse the word and concept of “diversity” rail too much about “monoculture” in “massive corporate” orchards and vegetable farms. But I bet it happens soon.