Discussing 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)