Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Featuring Gary Hirschberg, Michael Pollan, Troy Roush,
Joel Salatin, Eric Schlosser
Produced by Robert Kenner & Eric Schlosser
Cinematography by Richard Pearce
Certification UK PG | US PG
Runtime 94 minutes
Directed by Robert Kenner
Picture a world in which we have redesigned the chicken. Now it gets much fatter, much faster. These chickens are too weak to move more than a few steps and they don’t see daylight because the huge conglomerates controlling the food industry sever contracts with farmers who refuse to seal off their henhouses.
Here, cows don’t eat grass like they’re supposed to. Instead, they’re fattened up on cheap corn, which results in more manure, more bacteria, and more E. Coli. The cows stand in their own shit all day long, so disease spreads quickly. You can’t get too picky about your meat, as this country has just 13 slaughterhouses – that’s roughly one for every 23.6 million people. Meat-packing has become one of the country’s most dangerous occupations. These slaughterhouses are largely staffed by illegal immigrants, whose employers are in cahoots with the authorities. They have struck a deal where they arrest a few workers at a time, on the quiet, and leave the rest alone. They never prosecute the companies, they just arrest the workers.
In some parts of this country, food libel laws (also known as food disparagement laws or “veggie libel”) prevent people from publicly expressing their views on certain food products. For example, a very famous talk show host might wind up in court after making a comment about how Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease affected their desire to consume certain food products. A woman whose two-year-old son died after eating a particular food product might be so afraid of being sued that, while being interviewed on film, she would flat out refuse to comment on whether or how her family’s eating habits had changed. You can patent a gene in this country. One company has patented a particular kind of soybean seed which is immune to pesticides. Farmers are not allowed to save and reuse the seeds. They have to buy new ones every year. The company employs a team of 75 private investigators, who some call the “Seed Police”. If you reuse their seeds, they will pay you a visit. They may well sue you. You will probably drop the case, because the legal fees will run into thousands, if not millions.
Here, the official bodies that should inspect and regulate the food industry are staffed by people who’ve crossed over from the other side, so you’ve got, say, former beef industry lobbyists in charge of regulating their former colleagues. And whatever their, ah, dedication to the cause, their powers to shut down plants with high levels of disease have been quashed. They conduct far fewer inspections than they did a few decades ago. Meanwhile, one in three people born after the year 2000 will develop diabetes, and in ethnic minorities, it’s going to be one in two.
God bless America.
The world that Food, Inc reveals is one that even the likes of George Orwell and Philip K. Dick never imagined. It’s a world where the law is skewed towards big businesses, where unhealthy food is cheap and healthy food too expensive, where food labelling is misleading or missing. Where the food industry doesn’t want you to know if the animal you’re eating was cloned or not, because telling you might make you “panic”. You should panic. Food, Inc confronts the uncomfortable truth: cheap food comes at a price. As a vegetarian, I’m probably biased, because I already thought meat was disgusting long before I watched this. But there’s a difference between the farmer shown allowing his animals to graze on grass, like they’re supposed to, and the dark hellholes crammed full of wall-to-wall pigs and chickens. Even if you’re not the kind of person who is horrified by the sight of baby chicks being thrown into a chute, or row upon row of dead animal carcasses, the picture Food, Inc paints is not pretty.
Much as it sounds like a dystopian horror, this is a documentary. Producer-director Robert Kenner and authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) speak to everyone from chicken farmers (“More money in my pocket,” says one farmer of these superfast-growing chickens; he’s willing to allow filming inside his henhouses, but after multiple visits from Tyson Foods, Inc. he changes his mind) to a trade union organiser advising meat workers who are being deported. You might say it’s one-sided, though given the big food companies declined to comment, that was inevitable. In the case of, say, Super Size Me, you could argue that nobody ever said you could live on nothing but McDonald’s – lots of foods, or types of foods, would make you ill if you ate them all the time. But here, it’s hard to see the other side. Why spend money redesigning animals and feeding them on food they were never ate meant to eat and bullying farmers and patenting genes and lobbying congress and suppressing legislation when you could spend it on treating livestock, and workers, a little better and getting nicer food as a result? Watch Food, Inc, and you’ll be wondering this, too.