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Food, Inc.: enough to make you re-think your food

Anna Shepard | 25.02.10

It’s an Academy Award nominated documentary, praised not only by sustainable and organic food fans, but also by American chat show diva Oprah Winfrey. “You have a right to know where you food is coming from,” she told millions of American viewers, encouraging everyone to watch the hard-hitting expose Food, Inc. After her endorsement, DVD sales rocketed to the top of Amazon’s charts. She’s right, of course, we should know more about our modern food industry, but once you’ve seen this film, you’d be forgiven for losing your appetite.

The truth does not make easy viewing. Directed by Robert Kenner - with contributions from Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation – the film looks at how a handful of large corporations has hijacked American food production, using increasingly suspect industrial techniques to serve up cheap ingredients, while also going to great lengths to maintain an illusion of wholesome diversity.

“Bigger, fatter, faster” is the industry’s approach, at the expense of human health as well as animal welfare. Although the film uses American examples, you can bet your last chicken nugget that the same industrialized systems are at work in the UK. In fact, in the director’s talk - following one of London early screenings - Keener told the audience how close he came to filming in Europe, after discovering it was home to one of the world’s largest abattoirs.

From a chicken shed where ‘redesigned’ chickens have been bred to be so fat, they can’t stand up, to exploited workers who live off fast-food because a portion of broccoli is more expensive than a cheeseburger, Kenner guides us through various disturbing scenarios. He tells the story of Barbara Kowalcyk, mother to Kevin, a two and a half year old boy who died from E.coli poisoning after eating a contaminated burger. Her efforts to tighten meat standards reveal the dark forces at work to protect food companies and to keep consumers in the dark. You learn that profit has been put above everything. America, as a result, is facing an obesity and Type 2 diabetes crisis, as well as a serious public health hazard.

The film changes tack towards the end, focusing as much on upbeat messages about the power of consumer action as the dismal state of our food affairs. He draws parallels with cigarettes and the tobacco industry, forced to change and tighten its regulations.

We can all do our bit, stresses Kenner. We can demand to know more about our food, become informed consumers, vote with our wallets, and – of course - as the Oprah-effect demonstrated, tell others to watch the film.
 

Editor's Note:

For more information and actions you can take related to Food Inc., see Hungry for Change.

We further invite you to see writer Julia Haile's excellent review of Food Inc.:

"To my mind the most significant point made by Kenner was that the food industry is focusing on technical solutions to solve problems that arise from the industrial food system we've created. His view was that they should be changing the system itself. Factory farms, mega industrial processing, animals designed to fit machines and crops that are far removed from nature may not actually be the best way of feeding the world's population." Click to read the entire article.

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