Food and film have long been allies in the quest to appease the insatiable human appetite for sensory gratification. That conspiratorial bond has contributed much to America’s culture of euthanasia by pleasure. Your local multiplex makes more money on soda and popcorn than it does on ticket sales. Candy companies boost quarterly earnings by stocking grocery store shelves with flashy packaging bearing the likeness of the latest cinematic, autonomous, alien robot. “Dinner and a movie” has been the default first date for half a century. And if you’ve chosen “Food, Inc.” as the first half of that classic combo, you may not make it to the second half.
Producer/director Robert Kenner has committed the unpardonable sin in the high stakes world of corporate partnership. He’s turned one friend in that lucrative tandem against the other. Reading about the horrors of America’s industrialized meat production, as in Time Magazine’s alarming expose “Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food,” can be an eye-opening experience. But when the same frightening facts are revealed through the powerful medium of film, where grotesque moving pictures tell the story, the effect is a visceral sense of impending doom.
“Food, Inc.” is a sophisticated document that utilizes dynamic imagery and top-notch production values to disclose the ugly truths about the things we put into our mouths every day. It’s no secret that government subsidies have allowed corn, in its many forms, to infiltrate the average American’s daily diet, but few probably realize just how alarmingly pervasive the crop has become, and the very real threat this poses to our health and to the environment.
Apart from showing us the sickening slaughterhouses and ungodly chicken coups our dinner comes from, “Food, Inc.” fearlessly delves into the corporate corruption that shamelessly perpetuates America’s declining health and suffering environment, and the government that enables it. The agricultural technology company, Monsanto, emerges as the film’s primary villain. The latter half of the film shifts largely from the grotesque and unethical means of meat production to Monsanto’s relentless bullying of ordinary farmers who had no idea they were somehow violating intellectual property rights when the company’s genetically altered seeds blew onto their land. And the notorious “revolving door” between the private and public sectors is highlighted with queasy effectiveness with graphics that name a number of high-ranking government regulators that were previously associated with the largest corporations in the food industry.
The scariest part of all is that “Food, Inc.” isn’t just some alarmist propaganda film put out by PETA or an angry group of well-funded vegans. I was able to easily substantiate many of the film’s remarkable claims with just a few clicks of a mouse. Its message is simple, clear, and serious, and if we truly want to educate and prepare our youth for the issues the real world has in store, we’ll include films like this in every American middle and high school’s curriculum.
