I’ve often thought that a comprehensive solution to the problem of processed foods would be a ban on artificial flavours and fragrances. If people’s senses were no longer being tricked, they would soon stop eating these so-called “foods” because, without the “makeup” of artificial tastes and smells, I doubt that these industrial products would still make for an appealing snack or meal, let alone part of anyone’s “complete childhood”.
It's about time food got some ink!
But if the masses were to suddenly “go off their feed”, there could be an immediate shortage of the “real” alternative foods. Perhaps a gradual phase-out would be more feasible than an outright ban. Still, looking at the direction that government legislation on food has been going (gung ho for GMOs and their ilk), I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for action.
Still, the Food Inc. movie is a step in the right direction of building public awareness around questions like “what are we really eating?”. Here are excerpts from excellent reviews of the movie on The Ethicurian ,PBS, NPR and the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Ethicurian:
“….You’ve most likely heard about “Food, Inc.,” the new documentary about the U.S. industrial food system. (Watch trailer, [at bottom of post])
The buzz for the film is intense, amplified by an aggressive marketing campaign by Participant Media Productions (the people who midwifed “An Inconvenient Truth,” to which this is being compared).
“Food Inc.” opens in limited release today [June 12], and more widely on June 19. It’s already been extensively, and favorably reviewed: Metacritic.com assigns the film an above-average critics’ score of 82/100, which doesn’t include recent thumbs-up from the New York Times and the Atlantic.
In reaction, the food industry has mounted a Rovean-strength, batten-down-the-hatches preëmptive defense. (I can just picture the discussions in corporate agribusiness headquarters: “Gentleman, we thought ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Why are they scared? Well, “Food, Inc.” is being billed by its makers as the film that food industry titans don’t want you to see for the simple reason that “if you know the truth about what you’re eating…you might not want to eat it anymore,” as journalist Eric Schlosser says in the movie’s first five minutes. He might be right, although I’m not hopeful: I knew cigarettes were bad for me, and the tobacco companies I was financially supporting were essentially sociopathic, but I still smoked for 10 years.
What’s really worrisome about the industry’s multimillion-dollar anti-”Food, Inc.” campaign is that it could discourage a critical subset of people from seeing the movie: farmers.
Which would be a shame. Because even as our current food system has made Americans fatter and sicker than at any time in history, it’s driven more and more farmers out of business. The massive overproduction of cheap unhealthy food is not working for consumers, and it doesn’t seem to be working for farmers, either. “Food Inc.” persuasively confirms what the real “real food” movement has long held: the only beneficiaries of our current food system are giant agribusiness corporations such as Tyson, Smithfield, Monsanto, and others like them.
Which is exactly why Big Agribiz is trying to frame this film’s attack on industrial food’s health, safety, and hidden costs as an attack on “modern” farming itself. If your average Arkansas poultry farmer were to sit through “Food Inc.,” might they just want to stop raising cheap chicken for Tyson? Might my great-uncle who farms in Virginia question whether growing Monsanto’s jackboot-enforced triple-stack corn is such a good idea?
I wonder. And I’d really like to find out.
Participant Media has offered us (and other food-politics blogs) the chance to give away two matched sets of “Food Inc.,” a collection of essays and a guide to action released along with the movie, and “Fast Food Nation
The omnivore’s nation
Directed by Robert Kenner, “Food Inc.” is a cinematic mash-up of the best-selling investigative journalism books “Fast Food Nation
Read the rest of this review on The Ethicurian blog
Now from the SF Chronicle:
In case you are among the Northern Californians who have avoided thinking about where your dinner comes from, “Food, Inc.,” a documentary by Robert Kenner that opens on Friday in San Francisco, will send you to the refrigerator to inspect the information on your food labels.
With the film, which is based largely on the best-selling books “An Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan and “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser, the makers of “Food, Inc.” hope to transform Americans’ views on industrial food production, much the way “An Inconvenient Truth” helped turn global warming into a top national worry.
Among the points that galvanized the filmmakers:
– In 1972, the Food and Drug Administration conducted 50,000 food safety inspections; in 2006, the FDA conducted 9,164.
– During the George W. Bush administration, the head of the FDA was the former executive vice president of the National Food Processors Association, and the chief of staff at the U.S. Department of Agriculture was the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry in Washington.
– Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not designed to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus that sicken tens of thousands of Americans annually.
– One in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early-onset diabetes; among minorities, the rate will be 1 in 2.
Kenner, a Los Angeles documentarian, says he did not set out to make an activist horror film. In fact, his original goal was to tell the story from the points of view of both organic and industrial food growers. But representatives of the 50 industrial food companies he contacted, including Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson and Smithfield, would not talk and, more important, would not allow their production practices to be filmed.
“The fact is they don’t want us to see how the food is made,” said Kenner during a recent visit to San Francisco. “They don’t want us to know what’s in it. And, ultimately, they don’t want us talking about it.”
Kenner said he spent six years trying to make a film that would not appear one-sided or biased but admits he ended up with a “connect-the-dots” portrait of the American food system that is “Orwellian.”
Among the film’s subjects is Carole Morison, a Maryland chicken farmer, who risks her livelihood to show the repulsive conditions under which her chickens are fed and housed, per Perdue’s requirements. Morison is seen wading through a barn so stuffed with chickens covered in their own feces that there is no view of the floor. She sets about her daily chore: grabbing the birds that have died from trampling because they grew too fat to walk.
“I understand why farmers don’t want to talk, because these companies can do whatever they want to do as far as pay goes,” says Morison in the film. Equally maddening is Kenner’s portrait of a working-class Los Angeles family, who talk about why they eat fast food most nights: It’s cheaper than a home-cooked meal – because, as Pollan points out, it is largely made from processed corn, wheat and soybean, crops that are often genetically modified and heavily subsidized by the government.
Kenner is adamant that food is not an elitist issue. Rather, “it is a health issue, an environmental issue, a human rights issue. This industrialized food, whether you’re eating it or not, is going to cost us all.”
But what can be done? Although the film’s Web site, foodincmovie.com, advocates such tips as “protect family farms; and stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages,” transforming a monopolized food system that has government backing is a seriously uphill battle.
Kenner said it is unrealistic to believe we can convert U.S. agribusiness into a network of organic farms, but he sees glimmers of hope. Since he started researching “Food, Inc.,” he said, “there’s much more of a movement. When we screen this, people stand up and cry. There’s a built-in anger there. It’s Republicans. It’s Democrats.”….”
Read the rest of this SF Chronicle review here.
NPR has a seven minute audio clip about the movie on this page.
Here’s the preamble to that NPR audio clip (link above):
“The new documentary Food Inc.takes aim at corporate giants behind the U.S. food supply. As director Robert Kenner and food advocate and author Michael Pollan tell Steve Inskeep, they made the film in order to raise Americans’ awareness about where their food really comes from.
Pollan says he wanted to address “the pastoral illusion we’re spinning in the way we market food… You would think it comes from farms and that ranches with big hats are producing the meat.”
In fact, say Pollan and Kenner, America’s food comes primarily from enormous assembly lines, where animals and workers are being abused.
There are benefits to the current system; as Pollan points out, Americans spend less than nine percent of their income on food — less than any other people in history. But, he adds, the benefits have come “at an exorbitant cost, because the system depends on cheap fossil fuel to work. The system depends antibiotics to work. The system depends on abuse animals to work. And if people want to pay those costs for cheap food, that’s great, but let’s tell them about the costs first.”
Watch a 24-minute PBS interview with the movie’s director, Robert Kenner, here.
24 minute PBS interview with Food Inc. director
Watch the trailer for Food Inc. here:
3 Comments
June 17, 2009 at 9:14 am
A great way to avoid fast food is with “Healthy Highways: The Travelers’ Guide to Healthy Eating” This second edition has 1000 new listings. healthyhighways.com
June 17, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Sounds like a great idea, Scott. One of the big downers with travel is the challenge of finding somewhere decent to eat without spending a fortune.
June 18, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Hi there!
I noticed that you discussed the film Food Inc. on your blog and I wanted to let you know about a film called Our Daily Bread which I think you would find fascinating. It’s similar to Food Inc. in how it illuminates the horrific reality of industrial agriculture, however; Our Daily Bread is not an advocacy film in the traditional sense. The film communicates its messages using provocative images of places where food is produced by going deep inside the world of high-tech agriculture. Our Daily Bread touches on animal husbandry, labor issues, and the shocking reality of food production with a very distinctive style.
I appreciate you taking the time to read this. We are an independent company with limited resources, so if our film interests you, I would appreciate it if you could mention it in an upcoming post. If you have any questions about Our Daily Bread or Icarus Films, please don’t hesitate to contact me.