Food, Inc.
A documentary about the industrializing of the food business and its effects.
More a recitation of the myriad crimes of agribusiness than a particularly well organized criticism, Food, Inc. is one of those agitprop documentaries that is as predictable as a Sandy Bullock picture, but operates so keenly aware of the gravity of its subject matter it succeeds nonetheless at achieving most of its goals, which of course are entirely political and not at all cinematic. You’ll groan at the bluesy, reflective score and its desperation to make us pine for simpler times in the heartland, you’ll wonder why they didn’t just superimpose a halo above the head of the organic chicken farmer who’s in it for all the right reasons, and, despite these misgivings, 90 minutes later as the closing credits roll you’ll do all the filmmakers want you to do and agree with them that most of what you have just witnessed was some pretty fucked up shit.
There’s a fascinating statistic at the heart of the film provided by one of its chief inspirations, The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan: food production has changed more in the past 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. At first blush, I’m thinking “Hooray, Industrial Revolution!” At second blush, I’m thinking “Do I want to eat my car?”
The film thoroughly recounts the Industrial Revolution’s takeover of the food industry, its streamlining of processes and equipment. The story is a fascinating yet scattershot one. Director Robert Kenner is not a prosecutor looking to prove agribusiness guilty of one specific crime, he’s the muckraker out to make sure you know how loudly to boo when it walks into the courtroom. (Spoiler Alert: Really loud.) Every shortcut taken has its weeping mother whose son died because of a contaminated food supply. Every new bending of the law to favor the super-monster-mega-farmers has an old-timer in overalls bemoaning how hard it’s become for an honest man to make an honest living.
It ain’t fair, it ain’t balanced, and it sure as shit ain’t great, but Food, Inc.’s assurance of its own righteousness is ultimately becoming. One can very reasonably wish it were a more focused examination of the business practices, the science, and especially the politics that have shaped our current food situation, but one can’t deny that its simplistic, rambling structure serves its own motives well. The film’s goal is a pulling back of the veil that hides the product on the supermarket shelf from how it got there. Its ambitions aren’t artistic but sociopolitical. Its goal isn’t the fawning of cineastes, it’s a more educated and therefore rationally angry consumer.
Like those Sandy Bullock pictures, Food, Inc. presents two distinct options, one of unerring virtue, the other of uncontrollable douchetude. The merits of a film like this are to be determined by how strongly it can stir your support for the white-hatted small-time farmers in their fight against the agri-giants with their Nazi tattoo pornography fetishes. Food Inc., despite its significant shortcomings in other respects, does this quite well.
