Every now and then I used to play a game with myself at the grocery store. I would pretend I was just off the boat from Cold War-era Russia and absolutely bedazzled by the array of brightly packaged foods and vibrantly colored produce available in the supermarket. “Look!” I would gush to my imaginary comrade Svetlana, “There are hundreds of dry cereals! In Leningrad we have one cereal! Here there is meat you can buy every day if you want! There are fruits from the tropics, still fresh, even. Look, here is something called mango. What is mango, anyhow? I don’t know, but I love it! I love America!”
We Americans take the astounding variety and freshness of supermarket foods for granted. And yet, explains the narrator of the new documentary Food Inc., opening today at Landmark Plaza Frontenac, we really have less than we think we do. In truth, much of what the supermarket carries, and what, by virtue of cheap price tags, we are encouraged to buy, contains the king of all crops, corn. Maltodextrin, corn syrup and a couple of dozen other corn-based additives are in just about everything. (Author Michael Pollan calls these ubiquitous products “clever rearrangements of corn.”)
Is this stuff good for us? No, in fact, it’s a fast train to diabetes if consumed too often. So how did things get this way? Why is corn in everything? And what can we do about it?
Food Inc., like another recent doc, King Corn, exposes the corporate racket that controls what we eat. The new film goes even deeper, revealing widespread practices of cruel livestock confinement, the exploitation of farmers and labor, the genesis of super-resistant bacteria, the trashing of the environment, and the cooperation of the corporate-infiltrated USDA and FDA.
The film, which features commentary from Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), discusses how the rise of McDonald’s and fast-food culture has driven our need for cheap, plentiful meat. We needed bigger chickens, with faster maturation. We began to feed cows corn (more corn!) instead of grass. Soon, meat corporations like Tyson, Smithfield and Perdue would perfect high-yield factory farms where scenes of overcrowding are so horrid they tried (but failed) to prevent the filmmakers from entering.
The doc also has a segment on St. Louis’ own notoriously litigious Monsanto and its quest to drive farmers who don’t use its soybean products out of business.
The film gets pretty dark, but relief arrives in the form of mouthy organic farmer Joel Salatin. This opinionated, overall-clad food evangelist shows off his free-range cows, pigs, and chickens. The contrast between their gentle lowing, snuffling and clucking, respectively, and the shrieks of alarm from their counterparts at the corporate farms is notable.
Interviews with Salatin and others encourage us viewers to vote with our dollars. Even the mighty Wal-Mart, it is pointed out, stopped carrying milk from cows fattened on growth hormone when its customers made their preferences known.
Food Inc. has the smell of progressive propaganda about it, but it does leave you wondering how we could let the corporate takeover of the grocery store become so thorough, with what seems to be so little regard for food workers and consumer health. It’s really more of an important film than an enjoyable one, and will probably wind up on the PBS POV series of documentaries soon. If Tyson, Smithfield, ConAgra or any of the other major players in the American food industry come forward to defend themselves, it would make interesting reading. Their refusal to be interviewed for a film that comes off as more sensible than radical speaks volumes.
– Byron Kerman
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2009.