Movies |
Food, Inc.
directed by Robert Kenner
By
Published: Feb 23, 2010
Category:
Documentary
They’re working class — in essence, poor. Every weekday morning, they leave the house at 6 AM. They’re not home until 9 PM.
Where do they — and their kids — have breakfast?
The drive-in lane of a fast-food chain.
Why?
Because hamburgers are a buck. And real food — we see them looking at $1.49-a-pound broccoli in a supermarket — costs too much.
Or does it?
This diet is wrong for the father. His medicine costs $130 a month. Vegetables or meds? It’s a tough choice.
Readers of this site aren’t likely to have that choice — you can afford to feed your loved ones. But those who have the luxury of choice are as much at risk as that family chomping on burgers made of meat washed in ammonia.
Did you know that the USDA doesn’t have the authority to close a plant that is churning out contaminated meat?
Did you know that, in the Bush Administration, the heads of agencies that regulated food and agriculture once were players in the industries they were now regulating?
Did you know how few companies manufacture America’s food — and that they’re so powerful that some of them want to forbid photography of their animals?
Food, Inc. is, says director Robert Kenner, “almost like a horror film, like ‘Invasion of the Food Snatchers.’ ”
Actually, it’s more like a Val Lewton movie. Lewton, a genius direct of grade-B horror films, understood that seeing the scary moments gets old fast. Better to come close…hear the danger…and turn away. That way, when you have a really scary moment, the audience completely freaks.
That is the movie the food industry forced Kenner to make. That’s a strange thing to say, but it’s the truth — the meat and poultry producers were so united in keeping this film crew out of their plants that when you finally do see a slaughterhouse, it gives you the heebie-jeebies.
Why don’t they want us to see how our food is processed?
Because even the slowest thinking viewer might form this thought: If this is how little they care for the animals, how much do they care about the customers?
Answer: They do care, and in the same way — as corporate profit.
So you’ll watch as the crew tries to visit a chicken house. No luck. And the numbers tell the story. A chicken farmer might borrow $500,000 from the bank to build two chicken houses. He’ll then contract with a Tyson or Purdue to buy all his birds. From those two chicken houses, he’ll see maybe $18,000 a year.
Essentially, he’s a serf. For this is corporate feudalism.
And this is how an exploitative business can play out for the consumer — in a family-made video of a two-year-old boy on vacation. Two days later, he’s had a hamburger tainted with E coli. His kidneys break down. He dies fast — but it’s weeks before that beef is pulled off the market.
What are you having for lunch/dinner today?
Naturally, the food industry swears it’s all lies. In the spirit of fairness, here’s a site that one company launched to rebut the charges of “Food, Inc.”
Amazon.com sells this movie for $10.99. It rents it — video on demand — for $2.99. If you missed it when it was released, this is a splendid chance to catch up on a necessary film. Not to overstate, but it could save your life.
