I'm Seven Movies Behind!

#16: Food, Inc.

Directed by Rob Kenner, this is a preaching to-the-converted, Academy Award™ nominated documentary that, in the words of the press release, "exposes" the "mechanized underbelly" of America's food industry. Lining up the usual horrors: E-coli infected strawberries,dead children, feces in your hamburger, epic levels of Type II diabetes, sad-eyed cows strung up, alive, by their back feet to bleed out in the kill line, and that the victims of Nixon-era farm policy are the poorest people in our society. If you've read Fat Land and Omnivore's Dilemma there is nothing here that you don't already know. Granted, it is stuff that you should know but is there really anyone in America that can still muster righteous shock at learning that CHICKENS live in CAGES and that $1 Big Macs rest upon a tower of unconscionable human and animal suffering? We all know this but we as a civil society have, apparently, decided this is a price we are willing to pay for tomatoes in Colorado in December.

This film does have the advantage of providing a nice visual canvas to draw together the disparate threads of food politics. Reading about industrial chicken sheds is one thing but to see footage of the farmer picking the dead chickens out of an empty barn, preparing for the next shipment of Tyson chicks is something else. Considering the implications of proprietary, patented, seeds on corn monoculture takes on a different feel when the filmmakers follow a man who makes a living by cleaning seed corn being hounded by Monsanto lawyers to turn in his clients and neighbors for violating the seed saving restriction of their contracts.

Most interestingly, this film connects the dots between US industrial agricultural policy, the NAFTA-induced flood of corn into the Mexican market, the destruction of agriculture in Mexico, and the influx of illegal migrants into the US made up largely of former agricultural workers driven to work in US agribusiness. It is a chain of consequences that reaches beyond the partisan political debate and has the capacity to unite granola-munching hippies and Minutemen around a common cause. But there were no Minutemen in my audience. My audience was made up of equal parts back-yard survivalists and soft-hearted animal lovers who sneer at fat poor people trying to feed their families but gasp when the Tyson chicks are chipped for identification before shipping.

This film fails in exactly the same way that most of these sincere and pedantic films fail. People who will go to this film will leave feeling smug, superior, and well informed. Those who elect wallow in the worst of the American food system will not go to this film and will deflect the disturbing information with some variation on the John Travolta line from Pulp Fiction (but pork chops taste gooood). Those who don't have many choices will have their interests sacrificed to the Cargills of our world.

BTW, I also learned that Colorado has a criminal statute making illegal any statement that has the effect of disparaging the quality of perishable food intended for human consumption. So in my home state it may be a criminal offense to suggest that feces-infused hamburger, treated with sulfur dioxide to maintain its rosy blood-red hue well past is sell-by date, and compiled from hundreds of different animals is unfit for human consumption.