Fast Food Nation scribe Eric Schlosser is all over the food- industry doc Food, Inc.—a sign that filmmaker Robert Kenner is on the right track but also that we’ve done this before.
Indeed, the problem with this terrifying and well-researched scarefest isn’t intellectual but practical. It’s either redundant or inferior, depending on how you see it. In other words, either you’re getting, in a scant 93 minutes, shafted on plenty more information available elsewhere, or you’re simply watching a bloated advertisement for Fast Food Nation, as well as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemna, both of which benefit from being thorough. In any case, pick up a book.
There’s little use denying the potency of Food, Inc.’s chosen topic, however. Aided by Schlosser and Pollan as talking heads, director Kenner provides context and calm terror in an age when even the First Lady is planting an organic garden. Amid this green utopia, Kenner’s film depicts a Baudrillardian underworld, where corporations have seized (nearly) every last inch of our food intake, and thereby our lives, without us realizing or caring.
In short, a mere few corporations control access to all our food, putting farmers out to pasture even as their products are sold with images of agrarian heaven. Supermarkets promote the “illusion of diversity,” as one puts it, but it’s all the same couple products, most of them a bastardization of corn. (For more, see the more focused doc King Corn.) Throw in underpaid and poorly treated workers and the fall of the FDA under the last administration, and you’ve got food scares galore, though the infamous Jack in the Box e. coli incident did, for the record, occur on Clinton’s watch.
As a stand-alone product, Food, Inc. is a bone-chilling (to say the least) vision, and is well-structured and presented. But it also wants to be a beacon of information, and dispensing exposition just isn’t cinema’s strength. As with (to name just one) No End in Sight, Food, Inc. can’t help but feel subservient to the tomes that not only inspired its existence but even fuel it. Kenner would’ve had better luck following King Corn’s lead in zeroing in on a specific gripe and attacking from the micro rather than the macro level. As such, Food, Inc. is worthwhile but superfluous. B-
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1. Marcos said... on Jul 1, 2009 at 12:24AM
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