Want to get queezy and say ewwww. Then go see Food, Inc.
Want to get healthy, loose weight, and have a better life? Then go see Food, Inc. Learn and change what you eat.
I’ll see you there.
Two warring conceptions of the American food and agriculture business collide in the gripping agitprop documentary ‘Food, Inc.,’ the result of a collaboration between filmmaker Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. I’m using ‘agitprop’ as a descriptor, not a pejorative, since I personally agree with nearly all the arguments made in the film. Furthermore, if ‘Food Inc.’ comes off as a one-sided project, it’s easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film — Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto — universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.
On one hand, we’ve got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. “Food, Inc.” attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from 400 different cows.”