Food, Inc. filmmaker lets them eat burgers

[Guest guest]

by Janet Guttsman Tue Sep 9, 2008

TORONTO (Reuters) - Documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner still eats

hamburger, despite what he learned as he made " Food, Inc., " a frank

and sometimes gruesome expose of the profit-driven food business in

the United States.

But he prefers it ground to order from a single piece of meat, rather

than buying shrink-wrapped supermarket ground meat that comes " from a

hundred cows. "

" Food, Inc., " which opened at the Toronto Film Festival this week,

looks at agribusiness through the eyes of farmers, consumers and

legislators, contrasting the corporate image of red barns and white

picket fences with the reality of factory farms and humongous

processing plants.

The companies themselves -- companies like Monsanto, Smithfield Foods

Inc and Tyson Foods Inc -- declined to be interviewed.

" That was the real shocker. They didn't want to talk, they did not

want us to see where the food comes from, and they wanted total

control, " Kenner told Reuters in an interview about the movie.

The 96-minute documentary looks at poultry sheds and meat packing

plants, including secretly filmed footage of immigrant workers

tossing chickens into crates. There are graphic shots of cattle

feedlots and animals heading for slaughter.

Other topics include congressional hearings about food safety, the

corn subsidies that allowed the agribusiness to get so big in the

first place and the way retail giant Wal-Mart Stores is putting

organic produce on its shelves.

In a twist of language, farmers producing chicken are known as

growers, while the experts seeking higher yields of corn are the

breeders.

" It's a pretty easy decision to try to support things like organics

or whatever it might be based on what the consumer wants, " Wal-Mart

chief dairy purchaser Tony Airosa says. " If it's clear that the

customer wants it, it's really easy to get behind it and to push

forward and try to make that happen. "

The movie, which has yet to find a distributor, follows on from the

2004 documentary " Super Size Me, " where Morgan Spurlock eats himself

away from health on a month-long diet of McDonald's Corp hamburgers

and other food.

Kenner said he hoped his movie would help consumers to make better

choices, perhaps opting for locally grown produce over imports, and

unprocessed rather than processed foods.

But he insists he's not obsessive about what he eats, and happily

ordered the hot and sour soup at a Toronto restaurant, without so

much as asking where the ingredients were from.

" We're at a fancy restaurant and I would hope that some of it is

organic. At least at these prices it should be, " he said.

" It's really the industrial food that concerns me on a number of

levels. It's being made solely for profit and not for the health of

people eating. "