FOOD, INC.

     If you're wondering where your food comes from, or even if you think you know where your food comes from, or even if you don't care, you need to see this film!  Let me confess that I'm a foodies, a non-meat eater, so I guess for me it was preaching to the converted.  Yet this is not an anti-meat film.  It's a film asks us all to face the fact that just a few corporations have hijacked the American food supply and, not surprisingly, they do not have our healthy best interests mind.  

     Award winning director Robert Kenner teamed up with Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation)  and Michael Pollan (The Ominvore's Dilemma) to present a film that seeks to explain where exactly our food comes from.  He said he didn't set out to be polemical but then anytime you pull back the covers on industry operations, the rats and the roaches go running for cover.  Unfortunately, that has so often been the story of industrialization, until some regulations are enforced.   Then when the companies decide not to participate in the storytelling, that seems to be the nail in the coffin as it were.

     The film itself is straightforward, fast paced and pitched right at the middle, as in the non-food sophisticated average person, who might be willing to mobilize to change things.  There are horrifying (at least to me) scenes detailing the living conditions of the animals that become our beef, port and chicken.   Farmers discuss how they are forced by large industrial suppliers to abide by their bottom line driven requirements, like windowless, crowded chicken sheds filled with genetically tampered with chickens that can barely stand because they are all white meat.

     We also the human costs on many levels.  Barbara Kowalchyk lobbies Congress to require stronger food safety regulations after her 2 year old son dies from eating a fast food hamburger.  I won't spoil the film by telling you what a key Congress man says.  We see the state of the meatpacking industry and it's mistreatment of it's workers: agreeing to let Immigration and Customs Enforcement conduct raids of mobile home parks in exchange for their plants being left alone to refill their ranks with more undocumented workers.  These workers, by the way, come to work in the U.S. because they can't make a living as farmers in Mexico thanks to grain subsidies that make it cheaper to import than grow locally.  We also see the cost to poor people who find it much less expensive to give their children a fast food meal than to purchase a head of broccoli at a supermarket.

     Fortunately, Food Inc. also offers a way out, a call to action.  Gary Hirshberg of the organic yogurt producer Stoneyfield Farms talks about trying to get his products to lower income people by teaming up with Wal-Mart.  Yes, Wal-Mart was the only company that actually opened their doors to Kenner, happy to get some good PR for their attempts to introduce more organic products in their stores.  Now let's hope they don't run all of the local small farmers out of business.  One of those farmers, Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, is the poster boy for why we all need to get back to basics: eating grass fed, non-hormone injected meats and non-pesticide produced vegetables and grains.

     Ultimately for me, one of the most shocking things about this film had to do with soy bean farmers.  I'm a soy-lover as a veggie, I love all the various meat substitutes out there nowadays, although I'm rethinking all of that.  Seems that there's a monopoly on seeds and that companies are so strong that they can sue farmers for accidentally using or reusing the seeds that they are forced to purchase.  One farmer said he would love to grow something else, it was a call to us, a call for action.  And, as Kenner and others have pointed out, if we managed to take on the tobacco industry for killing us, we should be able to do something about the food we have to eat to stay alive.  Go see the movie and then check out takepart.com/foodinc.

Food, Inc. opens nationwide June 12, 2009.

Directed by Robert Kenner; produced by Robert Kenner and Elise Pearlstein; director of photography, Richard Pearce; edited by Kim Roberts, music by Mark Adler.  Released by Magnolia Pictures.  Running time: 93 minutes.

With: Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Carole Morison, Barbara Kowalcyk, Joel Salatin, Moe Parr, and Gary Hirshberg.