Movie review: “Food, Inc.”
From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman. 2 1/2 of 4 stars.
Watching the documentary “Food Inc.” is like noshing a giant serving of chicken livers and Shock Tarts at 3 in the morning.
The film overstuffs the viewer with rich food for thought but leaves you with the unsatisfied feeling that it missed the mark. And the liberal sprinkling of scare tactics quickly adds a sour taste.
“Food Inc.” is showing this weekend at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Filmmaker Robert Kenner asks an important question: “How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families?” It’s a vital question because many Americans don’t know much about how our country now produces what’s for dinner.
From the outset, he rightly dispels the myth that much of our food comes from those idyllic family farms we see pictured on the side of butter containers and cheese wrappers. Nowadays, a few multinational corporations grow, raise, slaughter, process, package and ship from highly mechanized factory settings the vast majority of what we eat.
Efficiency is the bread and butter. And yes, it’s disturbing that making lots of money and lots of cheap food seems much more important than food safety standards, humane treatment of animals and workers, the livelihood of farmers and decent environmental practices.
Several of the corporations in question refused to be interviewed for the film. Kenner focuses most of the screen time on two writers, Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation.” He occasionally features a farmer, crop council representative or corporate suit. His most effective interviews are with a grieving mother whose son died of E. coli, making her an advocate for tougher meat processing safety laws, and an independent farmer using organic methods.
The film tours overcrowded chicken coops, various slaughterhouses and supermarket aisles. Often, a somber unidentified narrator, urgent music and lingering shots of doomed cows and pigs are used to ramp up the shock value. Kenner’s apparent determination to scare Americans onto a starvation diet often overshadows the good information he wants to convey.
But not all of the film’s information is good, or at least it’s one-sided. As the daughter of one of the few independent, traditional, commercial family farmers still in business in this country, I can tell a bull from a steer. And I’m not going to be so grossed out by slaughterhouse scenes that I don’t notice the bull.
The film states as fact that feeding corn to cattle has produced powerful strains of E. coli bacteria; this is at best a theory. My father feeds the cattle he raises for our home use alfalfa and straight corn (not corn blended with other grains like the feed lots the film shows), and we haven’t contracted E coli. And while one E. coli outbreak, recall or death is truly too many, considering the amount of beef produced in these mega-processing plants, it seems that if corn were the culprit, we’d see more E. coli episodes.
It’s easy and fashionable these days to vilify corn, which my dad wants Kenner to know is not as easy or profitable to raise as the film would have you think, because it’s in so many products, including several unhealthy ones.
And it’s easy to laugh or scoff at the “veggie libel” laws that allowed beef producers to sue Oprah Winfrey after her episode on mad cow disease. But the film doesn’t show a farmer like my father who lost thousands of dollars that day because of a celebrity’s half-baked, dramatized-for-TV statements.
But for all the information – good and bad – Kenner stuffs into the film, he manages to only allude to the essential point. In one scene, the organic farmer, Joel Salatin, mentions that some customers complain about paying $3 a dozen for his eggs while swilling 75-cent cans of soda.
The truth that “Food Inc.” doesn’t push too hard is that corporations aren’t really the culprits. We are. As consumers, we demand that our three squares a day come dirt cheap, so we have more cash for $4 lattes and $1.25 pops. The corporations just cater to our huge appetites for junky, cheap food – and do whatever it takes to keep it as cheap as we demand it.
And that’s a much tougher message to swallow.
- BAM
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Comments
The primary point and purpose of the movie is to expose a side of the industry that clearly is being hidden from the public eye. The consumer does have a responsibility to understand what they are buying, but if the information is hidden from their view by the same regulatory agencies stocked full of ex-industry infiltrates with questionable motives, how are we to know what it is that we are truly consuming in order to make an informed decision for our own health? Our history of monopolies and dangerous trusts shows us that companies who carry too much market share, especially when the products or services they offer are of necessity, cannot be trusted to objectively weigh the benefits of profit vs. safety of consumers.
Corn may not be easy to grow, but it is heavily subsidized by the government, as the movie describes. The impact of this subsidiization allows americans to pay in the form of a tax (either in inflation or direct tax) a portion of the costs of their food. This absolutely benefits the industry, by allowing corn based products to be lower in cost as the same margin as non-subsidized foods, or to be offered alongside non-subsidized foods at the same price will larger margins for the industry. At the end of the day, this is a deceptive, monopolistic, pricing shell game where the consumer is led along the path.
The hispanic family is a perfect example of what happens when people finally begin to wake up to the wool being pulled over their eyes. After having spent many years buying and consuming cheap, corn based food, the obesity led to diabetes… they now become more aware of the dangers of this sort of diet (not as a result of the sellers of such product informing then of course)… they are now faced with a choice of buying more expensive vegetables and other food sources not subsidized, or paying for the vital medicine needed to control the diabetes.
It is a very efficient system that is very ineffective as feeding us food that makes us stronger and healthier as humans. It is time for us to demand change. I like that Food, Inc. leaves the audience with a positive message… we changed tobacco, one of the most powerful trusts on the planet, we can change this. Ask questions about your food, vote with your dollars….
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I think you’re right about the real problem. People will pay anything for something they want, but if it is something they need they want it to be dirt cheap. To give an example, I was in the store one day and the person I was with wanted to buy some pretty glass bowls for a decoration. They naturally went to the decoration aisle and found some glass bowls they liked, but were amazed at how expensive they were. I quickly took them over to the kitchen supply aisle where they found almost the exact same bowls for $4 less per bowl. See bowls to eat out of are a necessity, so they can’t be priced high. (People would freak out.) Bowls to put decorations in are just something you want, so you can charge anything for them. It’s the same reason people will spend hundreds or even thousands on a HDTV, but freak out when the price of milk goes up 5 cents.