(2009) In this proselytizing documentary against the food industry, director Robert Kenner and the two influential journalists/authors who contribute their views - Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, who wrote The Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation, respectively - argue that the stakes are high for piling the beef steaks, pork chops, and chicken breasts so high on our plates.

Some of the images are disturbing, though not nearly as gruesome as those I've seen elsewhere taken from inside abattoirs. However, none of these three men are themselves vegetarians.

Today's farmer can grow 200 bushels of corn on an acre of land, a ten fold increase over the past 100 years, thanks to innovations and improvements from seeds to fertilizers to pesticides. Thirty percent of agricultural land is now dedicated to corn production. On camera, saying that the agricultural industry produces "a lot of food on a small amount of land at a very affordable price," Richard Lobb, director of the National Chicken Council, then asks what's wrong with that.

To begin with there's the dishonesty of the illusion of the "cornucopia of variety and choice" without seasons in our supermarkets - on average stocked with 47,000 products, often using the false pastoral imagery of traditional agricultural - because most food items are manufactured by a handful of industrial giants using corn or soybeans engineered in one way or another. These corporations vigorously oppose labeling on their products and use their influence to legislate laws against criticism of themselves.

By design, the ordinary consumer has become disconnected from and ignorant of the origins and processing of his/her comestibles: "If you knew, you might not want to eat it." In the last 50 years, agriculture has changed in more ways than in the previous 10,000: as farms became large corporations, highly mechanized and uniform, competing to supply fast-food chains (dependent on low-wages and uniformity of product) with the volume necessary for economies of scale, animals and workers were abused on assembly lines in farm factories.

Most of the companies mentioned in the film - Tyson, Perdue, Smithfield, Monsanto - refused to be interviewed and prohibited filming of farming operations. One chicken farmer, Carole Morison, who allowed cameras inside her chicken houses, points out the problems of overcrowding, filth, antibiotic resistance, and cruelty to the chickens as well as how farmers dependent on contracts are controlled ("like being a slave to the company"), kept in debt with requirements to constantly borrow and spend for upgrades.

In Tar Heel, NC, at the largest slaughter plant in the world run by Smithfield, 32,000 hogs are butchered daily; the company recruits and hires illegal workers from Mexico, many of them former corn farmers who could no longer compete with US corn prices. (While immigration authorities often arrest workers, as a method of control, management appears to be immune to federal interference.)

Government regulation and oversight have been reduced and made "toothless." The mother of a child who died from ingesting E. coli 157H7 bacteria in hamburgers (the result of cows being fed corn and kept in close quarters), Barbara Kowalyck, has been crusading for seven years for passage of Kevin's law, in memory of her son, which would empower the FDA with the authority to shut down contaminated meat plants, but thus far the industry receives more protection than American citizens.

On the seed side of the agriculture business, Monsanto has patented the genetics of plant life with its genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and coerced farmers - with the backing of the US Supreme Court in the person of Justice Clarence Thomas as well as both the administrations of Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush - into having to purchase new GMOs each season, making capture of seed and replanting from their crops subject to lawsuits and prosecution.

Among the hidden costs of all this cheap, subsidized food are damages to the environment and to human health (e.g., obesity and its attendant illnesses). The average American consumes nine ounces of meat daily for just 9% of his/her income, but fruits and vegetables, which are not subsidized, are more expensive.

In contrast to the factory farms, we are introduced to Joel Salatin, a farmer with Polyface Farms in Virginia, who raises cows, chickens, and pigs without subjecting them to unnatural diets or unhealthy confinement, and to the organic, sustainable operation of Stonyfield Farm, which in selling its yogurt to Wal-Mart claims to be helping save the world from artificial products.

The recommendations from the film for consumers to become more informed of what they're eating, to demand from legislators better enforcement of food safety, to purchase as much as possible from local farms and ranches that are respectful of animals and employees, to plant their own gardens, are worthy and reasonable goals.

If this increases your appetite for more demonization of factory farms and farmed fish, novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, describing his enlightenment toward becoming a vegetarian, has written a nonfiction book, Eating Animals, in which he draws analogies between human atrocities and the slaughter of animals, claiming, for example, that KFC: "is arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history."

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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