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Food, Inc.
This entry was posted on 6/12/2009 8:15 AM and is filed under Film Reviews.
Di scussing
the slow-drip revelations of steroid use in baseball with a friend recently, I
made the point that if a professional athlete didn't know what he or she was
putting in their body (as Barry Bonds and now Manny Ramirez have each claimed, among others),
it was only because they didn't want to know. My friend agreed. If your
livelihood depends on peak-performance physical fitness, knowing the details of
any supplement you ingest takes on extreme importance.
That point is
still valid, I think. And yet, watching Robert Kenner's powerhouse, revelatory
documentary Food, Inc., one comes to realize just how much of our diet
is outside our personal control, almost no matter how healthy we aim to be.
Unless you grow and locally source all of your own food, we are each, to
varying degrees, prisoners of a system in which mega-companies like McDonald's
— to use but one example, since it's the world's largest purchaser of beef —
can virtually dictate the terms by which cows are raised all across the United
States. This means that even if you're not pulling into the drive-thru for a
Big Mac, you're apt to buy ground beef from cows fed with corn, something they
weren't biologically designed to eat.
The
astounding ubiquity of corn and its many spin-off uses, including high-fructose
corn syrup (all deliciously subsidized by governmental policy), serves as the
leaping-off point for Food, Inc., which features interviews with
author-experts such as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael
Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), as well as forward-thinking social
entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farms' Gary Hirschberg and Polyface Farms' Joe
Salatin. Kenner
lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized
underbelly that's been hidden from the pastoral fantasy — red barns, white
picket fences, rolling green hills — American consumers have been, ahem, fed.
In the wake
of documentarian Michael Moore's box office successes and Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, politically agitative nonfiction works have a certain
cachet they didn't have a decade ago. Apart from its thought-provoking value in
this arena, though, what helps truly distinguish Food, Inc. are three
things. First, the polished sheen of its production; there's just a pinch of
the wry, pop vibrance of Super Size Me. Second, a counterbalancing optimism as to how to
make positive changes. And third, true heart. In fact, the inclusion of a story
strand concentrating on a Colorado
mother who lost her two-year-old son to E. coli from a hamburger gives Food,
Inc. a tangible emotional connection that a lot of mainstream dramas, let
alone like-minded docs, simply don't have.
In revealing
surprising truths about what goes into the foods we eat and how they're
produced, Food, Inc. not only makes obvious links between our
high-caloric modern choices and rising obesity, heart disease and adult-onset diabetes rates,
but also the relative collective impotence of our government's regulatory
agencies, the USDA and FDA. In clear, concise terms, Kenner correlates how efficiencies achieved
in food production and packaging are precariously built on a house of cards,
since the trade-off comes via a food supply now controlled by an ever-dwindling
handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health and the
livelihood of the American farmer.
Perhaps most
chillingly emblematic of this is Monsanto, whose genetic modification of a
soybean resistant to the weed-killing chemical spray Round-up has given them a patent
on the seed. With skull-crushing efficiency, including lawsuits and private
investigator enforcers, the company has driven small farmers who don't adopt
their seed out of business, growing their market share from two to 90 percent
in just over a decade. In a few years, it may be possible that regular soybeans
won't be domestically available at all.
No matter how
much of a cinephile one is, it's reasonable to say that only a handful of films
in any given year might actually impact your life. And it's a tough thing — to
be interesting and progressive, persuasive and affecting, all in
almost equal measure. And yet Kenner
pulls it off. Food, Inc. certainly isn't the sort of film that puts a feel-good
spring in your step, but it appeals to both the head and heart in such a
clear-eyed fashion as to make you want to take better care of yourself as well as those around you. And that's a powerful thing. (Magnolia, unrated, 93 minutes)    
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