New documentary 'Food, Inc.' offers troubling view of American food industry

[Guest guest]

New documentary **Food, Inc.** offers troubling view of American food

industry

Published: Friday, June 5, 2009 | 2:47 PM ET

Canadian Press Ann Levin, For The Associated Press

_http://www.cbc.ca/cp/health/090605/x060515A.html_

(http://www.cbc.ca/cp/health/090605/x060515A.html)

 

 

NEW YORK - The new documentary **Food, Inc.** begins with idyllic scenes

of American farmland, panning from golden fields of hay to a solitary cowboy

rounding up a herd of cattle. Then the camera zooms in on a grocery cart

overflowing with packaged food and rolling down the aisles of a gaudily lit

supermarket.

 

 

Eerie, horror movie-style music swells in the background. It's meant to

signal the audience that the pastoral fantasy of agrarian America on

everything from packages of breakfast sausage to cereal boxes is not what it

seems,

that great danger lurks behind the cheery images of 1930s-era red barns

and white picket fences.

 

Robert Kenner is bent on showing us a far grimmer reality. He

tells of dust-choked poultry houses where chickens never see the light of day

and are pumped so full of chemicals they produce more meat than their

organs can support. Eventually they collapse under the weight of their

abnormally large breasts and die before reaching the slaughterhouse.

 

 

He shows us industrial feed lots where cows are fattened on

chemical-enhanced feed and forced to spend their days standing ankle-deep in

manure.

 

 

Kenner relates the heart-wrenching story of Republican-turned-activist

Barbara Kowalcyk, who prowls the halls of Congress with her mother to try to

force lawmakers to enact food safety legislation that she believes could

have saved the life of her 2 1/2-year-old son Kevin, who died of E. coli

poisoning 12 days after eating contaminated hamburgers.

 

 

Kenner is hoping his film will raise awareness of the enormous price in

health and safety that he says Americans pay to gorge themselves on the

relatively cheap calories that stock supermarket shelves courtesy of a handful

of multinational corporations.

 

 

Just as the Oscar-winning 2006 documentary " An Inconvenient Truth " helped

galvanize the fight against global warming, Kenner and his partners want to

spur legions of activists to rise up and take aim at lawmakers and

government regulators they believe have been corrupted by lobbyists for

agribusiness.

 

 

An alliance of trade associations that represent America's meat and

poultry producers have set up a website to counter virtually every claim in the

documentary, from the contention that E. coli contamination could be reduced

by feeding cattle grass instead of grain, to charges that U.S. federal

inspection agencies are understaffed and ineffective, and foodborne illnesses

are on the rise.

 

 

The food industry says the film has **an astonishing number of

half-truths, errors and omissions** and that scrapping current production

methods in

favor of locally grown, seasonal organic food would result in a dramatic

increase in food prices and fewer fruits and vegetables year-round.

 

 

Janet M. Riley, senior vice president at the American Meat Institute, says

that contrary to the menacing image presented in the film, the industry -

comprised of **ordinary, hardworking people** - provides **the safest, most

affordable, most abundant food supply in the world.**

 

 

She also says it would be foolhardy to abandon modern food production

methods during a global recession, when people are starving in parts of the

world.

 

 

**Why would we want to turn the clock back to a less efficient way to

produce food?** she says.

 

 

Kenner's arguments will be familiar to readers of **The Omnivore's

Dilemma** author Michael Pollan, whose numerous books and articles have decried

the physical and even moral hazard of the industrial food system.

 

 

Pollan is featured in the film, as is **Fast Food Nation** author Eric

Schlosser, who wrote the best-selling 2001 expose of the fast food industry

that was later turned into a movie.

 

 

Pollan, who has criticized industrial agriculture for a decade, calls

Kenner's documentary **the most important and powerful film about our food

system in a generation.**

 

 

He says the director has broken new ground with his reporting on such

things as a new, high-tech system of meat processing that bathes beef filler in

ammonia to kill harmful bacteria.

 

 

Even though alternative agriculture represents just a small part of the

U.S. food industry, Pollan says he is **full of hope** about the future. He

cites the booming demand for organic food and the growing popularity of

farmers markets.

 

 

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sales of organics have

more than quintupled, increasing from US$3.6 billion in 1997 to US$21.1

billion in 2008.

 

 

Kenner, too, is optimistic, ending the film on an uplifting note. He sees

a hopeful model in the fight against Big Tobacco, which also seemed

invulnerable to attack by health and safety advocates - until it wasn*t.

 

 

Like Pollan, Kenner is heartened by what he*s seen so far from the Obama

administration.

 

 

Pollan, in particular, applauded Michelle Obama*s decision to plant an

organic garden on the South Lawn of the White House. Kenner says the president

won*t be able to tackle his other priorities of reforming health care and

halting global warming without changing the way Americans produce and

consume food.

 

 

So what do Kenner and Pollan believe the average person should do if they

want to shun the agribusiness model?

 

 

Says Kenner: **Go to a farmers market whenever you can. Eat a little less

meat. Read labels when you go into a store. Shop the outer rows of the

supermarket. Cook at home. Buy less processed food.**

 

 

And Pollan? All of that, and also this: **Get involved in your school

lunch program. Get junk food out of the whole school. Sign up with a listserv

for one of the many groups that*s tracking this. Your congressman/woman

needs to hear from you. "

 

 

Still, Lowell Catlett, dean of the School of Agriculture at New Mexico

State University, says U.S. consumers actually have a pretty good deal. Before

World War II, a quarter of a million Americans died every year from a

combination of unsanitary food and water and inadequate sewage facilities.

**Overall, we have a safer food system,** he said.

 

 

The film opens June 12 in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, with

wider distribution beginning June 19.

 

On the Net:

_http://www.foodincmovie.com/_ (http://www.foodincmovie.com/)

_http://www.safefoodinc.org/_ (http://www.safefoodinc.org/)