“Food, Inc.,” a new documentary about the nation’s food industry, should be required viewing for every American.
The 93-minute film, which opens Friday at Harkins Camelview in Scottsdale, enlightens, angers, inspires, repulses and saddens.
And, filmmaker Robert Kenner hopes, forever changes the way you look at food.
Kenner sets the stage with the doc’s opening line: “The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000 …”
Then he launches a brutally blunt exploration of the consequences — most cleverly hidden from consumers — of having the majority of food in this country now produced by just a handful of giant corporations.
Big Food, Kenner contends, started with the birth of fast food, particularly McDonald’s, in the 1950s.
Today, McDonald’s is the world’s largest purchaser of ground beef and potatoes, and one of the largest purchasers of pork, chicken, tomatoes, lettuce and apples.
So when the Golden Arches wants its Big Macs in San Diego to taste exactly the same as its Big Macs in Boston, the food industry is forced to accommodate.
And even those who never set food in a fast-food or chain restaurant are mostly stuck buying food produced by the same system at their local supermarkets.
Interviewing food-industry gadflies like Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma’), “Food, Inc.” makes a litany of charges, including:
• Concentrated animal feeding operations have resulted in chickens so heavy from being biologically “redesigned” they can’t stand up out of their own feces. Cattle are ground up with their own manure.
• Toothless regulatory agencies like the FDA and USDA are headed by politically appointed former food-industry execs. According to the film, the FDA conducted 50,000 inspections in 1972, but just 9,184 in 2006.
• Corporations like the chemical giant Monsanto allowed to patent crops like soybeans, effectively creating a monopoly — permitted by a Supreme Court ruling written by ex-Monsanto attorney Clarence Thomas.
• The food industry successfully lobbying for passage of so-called “veggie libel laws,” such as one that makes it a felony in Colorado to disparage beef. In several states, it’s seeking to make it illegal to publish any photo of an industrial food operation.
The film’s most emotional punch, however, is delivered by food advocate Barbara Kowalcyk (pictured at left), whose 2-year-old son Kevin died from E. coli poisoning after eating a hamburger in 2001.
Listening to the mother describe the agony of her son’s final days is heartbreaking. Learning that the plant had discovered the E. coli but didn’t recall the meat is infuriating.
“We put faith in our government to protect us, and we’re not being protected at the most basic level,” Kowalcyk says.
Kowalcyk helped write Kevin’s Law to give power to the USDA to shut down plants that repeatedly produce contaminated meat.
I not sure what’s more disheartening: That such a law doesn’t already exist, or that Congress refuses to pass Kevin’s Law now.
“Food, Inc.” does have its bright spots, though. It notes that sales of organic food products are growing at approximately 20 percent each year.
And, it argues, the power and influence of Big Food is impossible to sustain. The current food system simply requires too much gasoline for production and transportation.
And, so far, no corporation has been able to figure out how to grow more oil.
(”Food, Inc.” is rated PG for some thematic material and disturbing images.)
Twitter
Facebook
I haven’t seen the movie, but it looks like a lot of Michael Moore-ish scare-mongering, emotion-based argument and propaganda. Of course, the left has been crying about food production methods since at least Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.”
Food safety is extremely high in the US, at least as compared to the primitive food-production methods of the third world (which I personally witnessed in Afghanistan) that the left would apparently like us to return to. The simple fact is that we absolutely need highly efficient food production methods in a nation of 300+ million people of widely varying income levels. These methods may not be pretty, or comfortable for the animals used to make the food, and they may even cause guilt among people who equate animals with people. But they have evolved the way they have because they generally allow the best combination of affordability, reasonable safety, and convenient purchasing.
I, for one, am very glad to live in a country where I can buy a fresh whole chicken for less than a hour’s pay. In Afghanistan, buying such a chicken literally costs a whole day’s pay for an average laborer. Is that really how we want to live in America?
Mike — You should see the movie. It’s not what you think it is. For example, it has a segment explaining how Big Food has been a major enabler of illegal immigration in this country. If anything, that’s more of a right-wing argument than a left-wing one.