Behind the food industry's iron curtain
By Andrew O’Hehir
Two warring conceptions of the American food and agriculture business collide in the gripping agitprop documentary "Food, Inc.," the result of a collaboration between filmmaker Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. I'm using "agitprop" as a descriptor, not a pejorative, since I personally agree with nearly all the arguments made in the film. Furthermore, if "Food Inc." comes off as a one-sided project, it's easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film -- Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto -- universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.
On one hand, we've got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. "Food, Inc." attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from 400 different cows.
This change has had obvious benefits for consumers, a point that leftists, foodies and environmentalists sometimes overlook but that Kenner's film takes pains to notice. While chronic food shortages threaten the poor of Africa and South Asia with starvation, food in America is plentiful, various and exceptionally cheap. (Expressed as a proportion of the average family's budget, food prices have fallen by half in 30 years.) In the movie, Kenner spends some time with a working-class Latino family who say they simply don't spend enough time at home together to shop or cook. While dropping the kids at school and then driving themselves to work, Mom and Dad can feed the whole family at Burger King -- for about $11.
Locavores and organic mavens like Pollan (author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food") or pioneering chef Alice Waters have long argued that the American diet is unhealthy, wasteful of resources and ecologically destructive. But for the vast majority of working Americans, the low prices achieved by the mass-market food industry outweigh their arguments. As anyone knows who has made the switch, organic and locally produced food comes with sticker shock. Although the organic sector of the market is growing rapidly, it only represents about 3 percent of the total food market. If you surmise that that 3 percent correlates strongly with upper-middle-class, college-educated folks in coastal cities and college towns, you're probably right.
Although "Food, Inc." will inevitably be compared to "An Inconvenient Truth" (and there are undeniable similarities), it actually represents an earlier stage in the activist process. The latter film used a well-known public figure to galvanize widespread opinion on an issue that was becoming mainstream. In my conversation with Michael Pollan, he said the food-activism movement in 2009 is roughly where the environmental movement was in 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day. "Food Inc." is meant to be an opening salvo that gets people's attention, not the battle that wins the war.
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http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/06/12/food_inc/
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