Eric Schlosser’s powerful book Fast Food Nation opened with a memorable provocation to readers: to stop the next time they walk into an air-conditioned, brightly-lit, and inviting fast food restaurant, and consider for a moment what goes on behind the counter, and behind the corporate marquee; consider for a moment where the food you consume comes from.
Michael Pollan brought the same profound argument to his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma; only in his book, he asked the reader to take a closer look at their local supermarket.
Ever since these two great books were published, everybody has been talking about the food choices and dietary habits of an obese and increasingly unhealthy American public, seemingly addicted to food, processed cheap and quick.
The Real Cost of Processed Foods
But, what director Robert Kenner does (with the help of the aforementioned Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan) with Food, Inc. is to expose to the public the fact that while processed foods may be inexpensive at the check-out counter, they will cost dearly in the end.
The cost will be measured in the damage to the environment, public health, and labor safety. All of which will sound very familiar to anyone who’s read Upton Sinclair’s landmark book, The Jungle.
The film explains how American factory farms drove down the price of corn so much, that it devastated the Mexican corn farmers; thus, forcing Mexican migrant workers into the U.S. looking for work; where they were (and are) exploited for cheap labor. Where? The very same dirty and dangerous meatpacking plants that Upton Sinclair wrote about over 100 years ago.
One of the saddest things about this business, is the fact that it actually costs more to eat well; therefore the poor get fatter and sicker. There is a small, but significantly heartbreaking scene in the film, where a little girl sees a display of beautiful pears in the supermarket and begs her mother for one, but she's told no, they're too expensive. In the scene prior, the family eats a fast food dinner of hamburgers, 2 for 2 dollars.
Barbara Kowalcyk – Hero of Food, Inc.
One can’t help but wonder if the 21st Century Jungle will require the same alarm that stirred the citizenry to action as noted by Upton Sinclair: …because the public did not want to eat tubercular beef.
After seeing the devastating story of Barbara Kowalcyk, a mother whose young son died of E Coli poisoning from eating a hamburger in 2001, one will be hard-pressed not to want to take some kind of action.
Viewers will surely see Barbara Kowalcyk as the hero of Food, Inc., after watching her valiant battle against corporate lobbyists and politicians, in an attempt to pass legislation (Kevin's Law) requiring the government to force corporations to abide by food safety standards already on the books.
Joel Salatin – Star of Food, Inc.
If there can be such a thing as a breakout star in a documentary, then farmer Joel Salatin stands out as one of the most interesting and insightful characters to ever don a pair of overalls upon the silver screen.
Joel Salatin owns and operates a third generation family farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the way in which the viewer is introduced to Mr. Salatin is simply brilliant on the part of director Robert Kenner.
In a seamless segway Kenner transitions from the horrifying images of animals, dead and alive, compressed in an orgy of feces and blood at a factory farm to the pastoral beauty and simplicity of Joel Salatin’s pigs, cows and chickens roaming freely in the background, while Mr. Salatin delivers a pitch perfect sermon about the integrity of family farming.
In one scene, Joel Salatin seemingly encapsulates the entire film, when he movingly ponders whether the corporatists sitting in an office can differentiate between the animals being slaughtered and the consumers they’re selling to.
Special Features on the Food, Inc. DVD
Many complain that muckraking documentaries can be detrimental; while exposing serious and pressing concerns, films like Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, offer little hope; and often leave the viewer with a sense of impotence and powerlessness.
This is not the case with Food, Inc.
The special features on the Food, Inc. DVD offer a whole host of options for the viewer who may feel they want to change the way they shop and eat.
From a simple list of 10 Things You Can Do To Change Our Food System to an extensive choice of internet resources from which to take action locally and globally.
There are also a few rather benign celebrity public service announcements.
But, one of the more interesting special features is the inclusion of a short piece from ABC’s Nightline program entitled, You Are What You Eat.
The Nightline piece is essentially a love letter to one of the rare fast food chains that serves meat from small organic farms, Chipotle Mexican Grill. And it's actually a welcome bit of puff journalism to watch after having endured the mind-numbing greed and savagery of corporate America in Food, Inc.
- Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
- Language: English
- Subtitles: Spanish
- Number of discs: 1
- Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
- Studio: Magnolia Home Entertainment
- DVD Release Date: November 3, 2009
- Run Time: 91 minutes
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