Early in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., viewers are reminded
that there are no longer any seasons in the average American
supermarket. Fresh fruits and vegetables are always available, and if
those aren’t your thing, there are around 47,000 other, cheaper items,
from ketchup to Coca-Cola to Motrin, pre-soaked in high-fructose corn
syrup and ready for conspicuous, thoughtless consumption. The film
gathers plenty of informative, infuriating, and nauseating evidence as
it clearly and convincingly explains why the perennial harvest bounty
at the grocery store is probably a sign of the agricultural
apocalypse.
The most significant inspiration for Kenner’s righteous, muckraking
documentary is not the politically engaged essay-films of Michael Moore
but the magnificent, underrated 2003 Canadian documentary The
Corporation, a thorough, damning three-hour expose of corporate
culture’s global role in increasing land privatization, fostering
disastrous waste management practices, limiting journalistic freedom,
and causing water shortages, food riots, and the Seattle WTO
protests.
The impressive scope and sophistication of Food, Inc. owes
plenty to The Corporation, especially when Kenner explores the
areas of genetic engineering and crop seed patenting. The legal scare
tactics the Monsanto Corporation uses to destroy small farmers who
won’t use their super-soybeans are echoed in the incredible world of
“veggie-libel” laws, which offer glimpses of a nouveau Beef Trust so
powerful that they think nothing of suing anyone at any level who
criticizes their product, up to and including Oprah Winfrey (who, after
racking up $1 million in legal fees during a 1990s court battle, was
one of the rare targets who emerged victorious).
Food, Inc. wages a visual as well as ideological battle. The
slow tracking shots through spotless, overlit supermarket aisles are
eerie when contrasted with the film’s parade of stunning, sometimes
disturbing scenes covering the pre-packaging phase, from mountain
ranges of corn kernels to vast metal circulatory systems moving apples
and potatoes from the orchard and the fields to the produce aisle and
the deep-fat fryer to baby chicks sliding down metal chutes to their
doom.
This visual strategy is part of Kenner’s plan to lift the veil on
food production and confront the customers with the ways large
companies have met their needs, reminding everyone that “notional”
tomatoes and ammonized “meat filler” are now inextricable from cheap,
standardized eats.
Authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan
(The Omnivore’s Dilemma) guide viewers through the shots of
gridlocked livestock with sober, serious commentary taken piecemeal
from their bestselling books. Their facts are straight, but they’re
about as charismatic as two blocks of government cheese.
A far more entertaining and convincing defense of limited
agriculture comes from Joel Salatin, a garrulous Shenandoah Valley
farmer with a heart who raises free-range chickens, pigs, and
“salad-bar beef.” Salatin’s thoughtful, enthusiastic commitment to
locally grown, humanely raised meat and poultry is a fine, thriving
example of success within limits — a sharp rebuke to the
gluttonous market domination of the major food companies.
What’s equally interesting about Salatin’s scenes in Food,
Inc. is that the animal slaughter essential to his business is not
glossed-over; the buckets stained with blood the color of a barn and
the squawked “ows” of chickens before their throats are slit actually
balance the long take where Salatin sings the praises of open-air
chicken-gutting visually and aurally.
After such a provocative examination of the social, economic,
medical, and environmental crimes perpetrated by the current food biz,
the vague and “inspirational” PowerPoint presentation that closes the
film is disappointing. But if history (and the anti-tobacco movement,
which Schlosser sees as a valid strategic blueprint) has taught
anything, it’s that stomachs must be turned before hearts and minds are
stirred to action.
