The documentary on the food industry went into wider distribution this weekend. Critics agree — SEE IT!
After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both are in the film). But every frame makes you choke on your popcorn—if for no other reason than the focus on government-underwritten corn and the companies who put it into everything from soda to Midol to the gassy, E. coli–ridden bellies of factory-farmed cows. The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing—it touches on every aspect of modern life. It’s the documentary equivalent of The Matrix: It shows us how we’re
living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. We humans can win, but we should hurry, before Monsanto makes a time machine and sends back a Terminator to get rid of Schlosser and Pollan.
WaPo:
In the muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair and the slick documentary stylings of “An Inconvenient Truth,” Robert Kenner’s “Food, Inc.” seeks to lift the curtain on the cynical and often sickening workings of the modern industrial food system. This absorbing film looks terrific and does a superb job of making its case that our current food ways are drastically out of whack. The trick will be getting “Food, Inc.’s” message beyond its natural constituency of the already-converted to the millions of shoppers whose choices in the marketplace, the film argues, represent a tsunami of untapped power.
Starting with the chicken and beef industries, the filmmakers trace how fast-food culture created the corporate concentration of agricultural production and the disappearance of the traditional family farm. With damning hidden-camera footage and interviews with such pioneering journalists as Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, “Food, Inc.” deftly demonstrates how issues such as illegal immigration, public health and intellectual property law intersect at the largely hidden nexus of Big Meat.
The world of food has changed. The simple hamburgers our grandparents ate are distinctly different from the ones many of us consume today.
“Our food has transformed without us seeing these changes,” Kenner said. “Chickens are designed to have large breasts and grow a lot faster. The tomatoes, they don’t go bad. But they have no taste at this point. They’re nice and shiny and red. They look the same on some levels, but they’re a different tomato.”
A hamburger from an industrial plant can be ground from 400 animals from six different countries. This method of mass production — in which only 12 plants make more than half the meat on the market — makes a cheap burger, but the risk might not be worth the reward if any stage of the process introduces contaminants.
“You have one plant that might be grinding 10 million burgers in a week and that’s very dangerous,” Pollan said. “If a microbe gets in there, E-coli or something like that, it now affects 10 million people.”
And the food industry is fighting back:
The Stranger:
Here is a farmer sitting at his kitchen table, tired and defeated: Monsanto, insanely, won’t let him use his own crop seeds and help others do the same, as farmers have done since time immemorial. Here is a mother who lost her child to E. coli from a fast-food burger: She determinedly walks through the halls of justice, though it’s been years and no headway has been made. (Bonus, repeated several times: home movies of the toddler playing on a lakeshore before he died.) Those chickens that live smashed together in giant dark hangars, bred to have breasts so big they couldn’t walk even if they had room? Present, and plenty are prematurely deceased, all limp and feathery. Assembly lines of meat-processing plants are accompanied by foreboding music. Hidden-camera footage shows hogs being shoved en masse into death chambers.