Gather Round the Table: Food, Inc. Movie Review

In 2006 Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim shook the world awake with their Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Now a film every bit as jarring has been realesed, about a subject that threatens us far more immediately even than climate change: our own food. It’s called Food, Inc., and the strange thing is it took a lot of begging and tooth-pulling to get it to Iowa, even though not showing a documentary about the perils of industrial agriculture here in the belly of the agribusiness beast is like not showing An Inconvenient Truth on earth.

In many theaters now and on DVD in November, Food, Inc. shows us how and why, as co-executive producer Michael Pollan put it, “the way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000.” Our grocery stores have more products than ever, but this is an illusion of variety. Of those 47,000 products, about 90 percent are made corn, soy, or both.

No one can contest that food is every bit as important to human survival as air or water. If the supply of our air or water were to somehow come under the control of just a handful of multinational conglomerates, who could regulate – unabated – who got how much water or who would be allowed to breathe, we’d be in the streets with torches and pitchforks in our millions. Yet today that is precisely what has happened to our food.

Consider these bullet points from the film:

• In the 1970’s, the top five beef packers controlled 25 percent of the market. Today the top four control 80 percent.

• Also in the 70’s we had thousands of slaughterhouses producing our beef, today we have 13. Yet we regulate them worse than before because (among many other reasons)…

• During the Bush administration, the head of the FDA was the former executive VP of the National Food Processors Association, and the chief of staff of the USDA was the former head lobbyist for the beef industry.

• In 1998 the USDA could shut down plants that repeatedly failed tests for e coli 0157:h7. After being sued by the meat and poultry associations, the USDA no longer has that power.

Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. This is just another example of the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

The filmmakers interviewed two chicken producers, one with a contract with Tyson, the other with Perdue. The Tyson farmer initially was going to let the cameras into his chicken houses, where he raised some 300,000 chickens at a time, but after repeated visits from Tyson executives, he changed his mind. Perdue-contracted farmer Carole Morison decided to tell the truth, let the cameras in, and subsequently lost her contract with Perdue. Executives of both companies refused to be interviewed for the film.

To get those contracts, which many farmers feel they must do to keep their farms, they are required to make massive personal investments. The average chicken farmer carries a debt of $500,000, and makes an annual income of $18,000. The corporations control every aspect of the production from hatching through slaughter to the styrofoam tray in the back of the grocery store. If a farmer deviates from their stipulations at all, their contract will be revoked and the farmer is left with nothing but the half-million-dollar debt. This is nothing short of indentured servitude.

Of course no film featuring Michael Pollan could be complete with a discussion of the role of corn in our food system, and Food, Inc. goes into graphic and often heart-wrenching detail about the consequences of mass-produced and government-subsidized industrial corn production and processing. They interview a food chemist who is quite proud of the technological achievements he and his associates have brought to market, and he considers the creation of high-fructose corn syrup to be the highpoint of those achievements. This despite the fact that the sheer ubiquitousness of HFCS in so much of the food that we – and especially our children – eat has led to a world where if you were born after 2000, you have a one-in-three chance of contracting early-onset diabetes. If you’re a minority, that ratio climbs to one-in-two. No amount of health care reform can deal with the costs that fact implies.

Fully one third of the land in the US is planted to corn. No doubt here in Iowa that proportion is much higher. The reason for this is that corn is heavily subsidized by your tax dollars. The same goes for soy. In 1996 when it introduced Round-Up Ready Soybeans®, agribusiness giant Monsanto controlled two percent of the of the US soybean market. Today 90 percent of America’s soybeans contain Monsanto’s patented gene. This from the company that, prior to rebranding itself an agribusiness company, was a chemical company that made its fortune inventing and then producing substances such as Agent Orange and DDT. The December, 2000 Supreme Court decision that helped Monsanto enforce its seed patents was authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, who from 1976 to 1979 was an attorney for – you guessed it – Monsanto.

Because we are, indeed, what we eat, this film’s dramatic issues touch every aspect of our lives, from health to education to energy, to climate change, national security and immigration. Author and Food, Inc. co-producer Eric Schlosser said in an interview, “The typical farm worker is a young Latino male who does not speak English and earns about $10,000 a year. The typical meatpacking worker has a similar background and earns about twice that amount. A very large proportion of the nation’s farm workers and meatpackers are illegal immigrants.”

Yet when asked if the American food industry could exist without these underpaid and undocumented workers, Schlosser said, “The food industry would not only survive, but it would have a much more stable workforce. We would have much less rural poverty. And… doubling the hourly wage of every farm worker in this country might add $50.00 at most to a family’s annual food bill.”

That Food, Inc. should have at least the same impact as An Inconvenient Truth (or for that matter, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle) is undeniable. Whether it will depends on how many people see it, and what actions they take as a result. If I had a magic wand to wave I’d make it required viewing for every student and every politician in the country. A few of its images are enough to make the strongest of us squeamish, and its segment about the mom who now lobbies Congress for stronger food safety requirements after an e Coli-tainted burger killed her son will wrench the most hardened of hearts.

Today if we are what we eat (and we are), then most Americans are fast, cheap, and easy. Perhaps this film will help that change.