Thursday, June 11, 2009

Food, Inc

"When you go to the grocery store there is an illusion of diversity. So much of our industrialized food turns out to be re-arrangements of corn"

The trailer:
http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/455396/Food-Inc-/trailers

A news article:
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Review: 'Food, Inc.' not for the squeamish
I was warned not to eat before seeing "Food, Inc.," a mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning expose on the food industry. Unfortunately, no one told me I might never want to ingest anything ever again.

"The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you're eating - because if you knew, you might not want to eat it." So says Eric Schlosser, author of "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal" and one of the film's two principal talking heads. The other is UC Berkeley School of Journalism Professor Michael Pollan, who wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and offers his own dark views on the business of American food production and the contents of American stomachs.

Directed and co-produced by Emmy Award winner Robert Kenner (PBS' "Two Days in October"), "Food, Inc." begins in the grocery aisles and tracks back to the seeds and slaughterhouses that produce, in large part, what we eat. In the process, it throws out one zinger after another, making its case with the methodical and unremitting force of muckrakers trying to radicalize - or at least rouse - a dozing populace.

We learn that the country's top four meatpackers control 80 percent of the beef market. We hear that farmers are subsidized to overproduce corn, which then goes into Coke, Sweet & Low, diapers, Motrin and cattle feed. We're told that the gut of a cow fed on corn breeds the deadliest strains of E. coli; that the Monsanto Co. owns every last one of its genetically engineered soybean seeds; that the Smithfield Hog Processing Plant in North Carolina slaughters 32,000 pigs per day. Fifty years ago, we're advised, it took 70 days to raise a chicken to slaughter. Today it takes 48.

Grim statistics pair off with arresting visuals: a researcher with his hand inside a cow's stomach; conveyor belts full of little yellow chicks, manhandled like car parts; a cow, not quite dead, getting pushed around by a forklift. There's also video of squealing pigs herded to their death on the "kill floor" of Smithfield, where, a union organizer says, the company recruits cheap workers from Mexico who often wind up arrested by immigration agents.

The toughest footage shows Kevin Kowalcyk, a bright-eyed 2-year-old splashing in a lake. He later died after eating burgers contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, prompting his mother to campaign for a law that would strengthen the U.S. Department of Agriculture's power to enforce sanitation and safety standards. But she won't say a word about her eating preferences - no Oprah-like rant against ground beef - for fear of being sued.

"Food, Inc." is almost entirely one-sided, but not for lack of trying. Officials at Monsanto, Smithfield, Tyson and Perdue all declined to be interviewed. The film's long list of producers include Schlosser and Participant Media, the company behind "An Inconvenient Truth," and it has the same flair for the dramatic and spirit of thorny urgency.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/11/MVE1184DN6.DTL

And

Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant
Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/movies/12food.html?ref=arts

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