Movie Review – Food, Inc.
Normally, I don’t write reviews for movies I watched on DVD. For certain movies, I’ll make an exception – movies that blow me away because of their content and execution. Movies like “Food, Inc.”
“Food, Inc.” is a documentary about the state of food consumption in the U.S. It tracks the common foods many of us eat in the grocery store all the way to their source and pulls the curtain back on them. It showed many of the problems with our current system and how misleading much of the food we eat is. Not a lot of what I saw came as a surprise to me after reading “Fast Food Nation” and “In Defense of Food”. Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan play a primary role in this documentary, and for good reason. They have done a great job in educating people about changing eating habits.
Seeing the things in “Food, Inc.” is a big difference from reading about them in a book. It’s not only heartbreaking to see the environment that cows and chickens suffer through, it’s also disturbing to think that those sickly animals wind up on our dining room table.
“Food, Inc.” succeeds where “Capitalism” falls short because not only does it present a problem, it presents it from multiple points of view, with depth, AND offers solutions. This isn’t a film that is politically polarizing. Nobody will confuse Joel Salatin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Salatin of Polyface Farms http://www.polyfacefarms.com/ as being a bleeding heart liberal. Gary Hirshberg didn’t please many of his hippy farmer friends when Stonyfield Farm began selling its organic yogurt at Wal-Mart. There is an understandable call for some type of regulation to help prevent many of the problems with tainted food and abused workers. However, there is also recognition that one of the most effective ways to fix these problems is to educate people and change what people demand. It’s basically a plan to exploit the large companies by beating them out their own game. Their bottom line is profit, so they don’t care if that profit comes from free range organic eggs, or chicken crammed into a dark space walking around in their own feces – whatever the consumer demands. So why not change people’s perception and create a successful and profitable system in healthy eating? I love that idea.
This movie is both disturbing and inspiring at the same time. It’s a wake up call to think about what you eat and how you eat. It’s a movie that can motivate you to adjust your long term eating habits. It does enough to justify thinking twice before opting for the cheaper, processed food. I’d rather eat smaller portions of real, whole food, than giant portions of the alternative. I hope that others follow.