DOOOOOOOOM. Are you aware that food in this country is all kinds of
messed up? Probably you are, in which case Food, Inc., a
101-level documentary about What’s Wrong and Why We Should Freak Out,
functions mostly as an emotional wringer and appetite suppressant. It
is very effective. Here is a farmer sitting at his kitchen table, tired
and defeated: Monsanto, insanely, won’t let him use his own crop seeds
and help others do the same, as farmers have done since time
immemorial. Here is a mother who lost her child to E. coli from
a fast-food burger: She determinedly walks through the halls of
justice, though it’s been years and no headway has been made. (Bonus,
repeated several times: home movies of the toddler playing on a
lakeshore before he died.) Those chickens that live smashed together in
giant dark hangars, bred to have breasts so big they couldn’t walk even
if they had room? Present, and plenty are prematurely deceased, all
limp and feathery. Assembly lines of meat-processing plants are
accompanied by foreboding music. Hidden-camera footage shows hogs being
shoved en masse into death chambers.
Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan—eminently reasonable,
concerned, well-spoken—are interviewed. Joel Salatin, an organic
rancher in Virginia, testifies a little wild-eyed, stealing the show.
The experts and the facts speak, loud and clear and plenty scary, for
themselves; it’s a small shame that Food, Inc. doesn’t just let
them. The clever title sequence is as emptily gorgeous and strangely
moving as Andreas Gursky’s famous 99-cent store photograph, but when it
segues into guys in suits marching across a field toward ominous,
smoke-spewing factories, it cheapens the (extremely important) cause.
Same with the jaunty tune that accompanies the organic yogurt
factory—it’d be terrifying, too, if it had the meat-music. When
you’ve got Schlosser eating a burger and talking you through it, you
don’t need anything close to propaganda. That being said, everyone
should go to www.foodincmovie.com/get-involved.php and
do the “10 Simple Things You Can Do to Change Our Food System,” because
otherwise: DOOOOOOOOM. 
bad link!
Thanks! Link fixed.
They will remember our time of history as the time of ultimate madness. This is the time where humanity’s communal suicide impulse reaches its crecendo. We’re attacking every bit of the working biosphere that sustains our existence. We are fucked.
Archeologists evolved from lemurs or parrots or genetically engineered parrot-lemurs will find the fossilized remains of our huge breasted chicken farms. They will marvel at the stratified layers of waste downstream from them. Hopefully these new species will learn how not to be assholes from the remains of the most assholish of species, humans.
What a load of crap.
So what if our food comes from an industrialized process devoid of morality?
It’s food. People need food. People want food. People will have food, in a perfect world.
Hopefully all the idiots who are influenced by movies like this will go spend four times as much on organic food and leave the cheap stuff for me.
Bring on the antibiotic injected, over-bred, big breasted, almost dead animals for me to feast on!
Smitty, you’re breathing my air. Stop it.
Smitty, you’re the reason children are starving in Africa.
This food inc nonesense is the biggest load of crap since the Adkins diet. Food is cheaper than ever. Genetically modifying food has enable more efficiency and higher yields than ever in history. If these people had their way food would be much more expensive, hunger would be a problem again, more people would be hungry and starve. This is a much more serious problem.
How food is prepared is the problem, how it is produced is fine. People want their corn turned into high fructose corn syrup. The corn itself is perfectly healthy to eat. People choose to eat unhealthy, they are certainly not forced to.
Organic food is bogus, you can eat perfectly healthy and not eat anything organic. Organic food is not going to make you live longer and healthier.
In fact it is quite the opposite eventually we can make our food more healthy. The United Nations are working on genetically modifying rice to include vitamin A which will be distributed to rice cultivating countries with vitamin A deficiency. This has the potential of preventing millions of deaths and cases of blindness a year! Of course these elitist food nazi’s are against it.
Genetically modified, its sounds so scary!!!
Less people die when food is produced cheaply. End of argument.
Simply want to say your article is as xlpharmacy. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and
i can assume you are an expert on this subject. Well with your permission allow me to grab your rss feed to keep up to date with forthcoming post.
Thanks a million and please keep up the gratifying work.