Food, Inc.

Food, Inc.

93 Minutes






After the tragic 2000 "election," I coped by joining every tree-hugging, peace-marching, polar bear-saving organization I could afford. In exchange for my 20 bucks I received bumper stickers and frightening e-newsletters, but none as disturbing as the Organic Consumers Association Organic Bytes. Here's a recent one, #176: Alert of the Week: Stop Monsanto's Genetically Engineered Wheat; Related Quote of the Week: The Hazards of Genetic Engineering, etc. I became afraid of food but I still managed to maintain my 22% body fat thanks to hunger-induced amnesia, eventually prompting me to mark the Organic Bytes harbinger of doom as spam right before heading to my favorite taco stand.

There's no way to sugar coat it. Food, Inc. is the feel-bad movie of the year; a terrifying and eerily prescient, non-fiction version of Soylent Green, the 1973 movie which depicted a dystopian future wherein overpopulation and the destruction of the environment have rendered human life cheap, but food--that is, real food--is very expensive. The government dispenses rations of synthetic food substances made by the Soylent Corporation: Soylent Yellow, Soylent Red, and the newest product, Soylent Green. It's all about the cheap food and so is Food, Inc.

Mass production and corporate control of our food is the frightening reality that led director Robert Kenner to make Food, Inc., a cleverly written, visually engaging and well-produced documentary grounded in old-fashioned investigative research and journalism that illustrates the fast-food model that led our country's most successful food producers to become powerful multi-national enterprises. Food, Inc. is aesthetically polished, visceral, compulsively watchable, engaging and as entertaining a movie about the poisoning of the American people can be. Rather than creating a clever PowerPoint presentation of familiar information, Kenner looks forward as questions of health point toward a massive collection of social issues and gives us a rude education about the unsavory origins of processed food before it's delivered onto supermarket shelves.

The opening sequences establish the film's visual and rhetorical style - a mix of talking heads, stock footage, statistics and history blended with a heavy dose of emotional appeal and a nod to Errol Morris. A floating tour of a bright, bulging, colorful American supermarket is followed by a series of clips that try to capitalize on the positive connotations we have with all things "natural" as well as appealing to our sense of nostalgia. We're told that the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000. Someone else pops onscreen to decry the use of agrarian imagery in selling food produced with the latest factory methods while another interviewee reminds us that the modern supermarket carries all sorts of food year-round which has disabused people of the old-time practice of eating seasonally. Finally, the dichotomy of multinational-owned factory farms vs. small, private ones is introduced. Spoiler alert: Don't buy popcorn. You'll be spitting it out as soon as they move into the subject of corn.

This movie is packed with information, including the following disturbing facts: Cattle are given corn-based feed which their bodies are not biologically able to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus. In 1972, the FDA conducted 50,000 food safety inspections, but in 2006, only 9,164. The average chicken farmer invests over $500,000 to comply with demands from Tyson and the other poultry companies and makes only $18,000 a year. Seventy percent of processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient. However, it's the personal stories that resonate the most. Among them: Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her son to eating a hamburger with E. coli and has become a food safety advocate. Moe, a seed cleaner who has been sued by Monsanto for amounts there's no way he can pay, even though he's not guilty of anything. An immigrant family's Catch-22 scenario; they have health problems because they don't eat well and they can't eat well because the medication they need to treat them is too expensive.

An Inconvenient Truth's politically urgent message did little else than scare us into turning off some lights and getting on a waiting list for a Prius, but keep in mind that you still have to eat after you leave the theater. Food, Inc. is neither gloomy nor convinced that this is a permanent state of affairs. Quite the opposite. After all, Wal-Mart has started selling organic food and the First Lady planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The qualities that make this documentary so appealing are hope and understanding. Arguably, the conclusion that eaters hold the ultimate power to change the status quo may be difficult to believe since many groups have spent a lot of time and effort attempting to reform our food industries. Yet, Big Tobacco was taken down. Food, Inc. is optimistic that we will vote at the supermarket checkout and affect the same policy change to eventually re-regulate meat production. I didn't shy away from the beach after seeing Jaws, but I haven't stepped in a supermarket or eaten meat since I saw Food, Inc. And, yes, I have un-spammed the Organic Bytes e-newsletter, read it on occasion and vowed to shop only at farmer's markets as soon as I eat all of the food in my freezer.

by Teri Carson