If you’ve read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, or the now classic Diet for a New America by John Robbins, then the images and ideas in the latest documentary to take a swipe at the hidden ironies and dangers of our national food system, FOOD, INC., may seem like something of a review session.
Oh, but what a review it is. Laced throughout with interviews with both Pollan and Schlosser, and filled with the kind of gross-out film footage you’d expect from a food industry expose, Food, Inc. does an okay job of illuminating some of the nasty secrets of industrialized food processing. It calls viewers to action to “vote with every bite” by turning against the giant food conglomerates that are making us all sick.
In other words, for people who are new to these ideas, the film is a great introduction to what is wrong with our food systems and what we can do to change them.
Sadly, judging by the crowd of 30 or so people who joined us in the Salem’s Cinema‘s gorgeous new Majestic theatre, the film’s producers were speaking to the converted here in Salem.
I’m an imperfect foodie myself. I try to shop at local markets (and feature them here), I pick my own, I can, I grow things at home, I seek out information about nearly everything I buy. But even I get lazy and pop a can of Spaghettio’s in a nostalgic rush from time to time (sorry Mom — I know, gross).
I promise you at least two months of energy to combat grocery laziness if you see Food Inc. Actually, you may never eat again when you see:
- chickens being processed on a factory line
- hamburger “filler” being process from meat by-products
- genetically modified foods being created in labs
- a mother’s lament after he son dies of E. Coli.
- the evil web of interconnection that shows the cross-pollination going on between the USDA’s leadership and that of the nation’s top agri-processors
- little chicks being tagged and sent careening over the edge of an assembly belt (Weeee! uh-oh!)
- Purdue chickens kicking it, concentration-camp style, in a Kentucky feed lot
Sense a pattern? I think those Salem chicken keepers have another argument for backyard coops.
I kind of love movies like Food, Inc., at least the genre they fall into — independent films give big f-u to U.S. industry monopolies. The same ideas are at work in some of my other favorite exposes: This Film is Not Yet Rated, a killer doc about the movie industry, and Ben Bagdikian’s The New Media Monopoly, the media scholar’s seminal work about the five media conglomerates that for so long controlled much of our information.
This works are empowering because they show how effective consumer choice can be if people educate themselves. Here’s to hoping the producers of Food, Inc. have reached a wider audience with this new film than the existing, if imperfect, converts.
Never eat fast food again? Should we make a pact on this, because I am in the same boat as you, from reading this entry!
Um, more like food. LIke the kind you buy at the grocery store. I remember being pretty grossed out by a 20/20 expose on Purdue back in the late 1980s. as in, all of our industrial processed food, not just fast food. Ick.
Cruel joke that I found myself in Wisconsin the weekend after this movie. . . surrounded by corn and soybean fields. . . and plenty of animal products. blech.