Food Inc.
Food Inc., the movie that won the award for best documentary at the RiverRun Film Festival, is finally playing in a Triad theater.
You have to go to Greensboro, though. It’s at the Carousel Battleground theater.
Here’s my review that ran in relish during RiverRun:
Food Inc. has a definite point of view: that the industrialized food system in the U.S. has produced an abundance of cheap food at the expense of Americans’ health and the environment. The movie comes from Participant Media, which made An Inconvenient Truth, and director Robert Kenner, and was co-produced by Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation.
The filmmakers contend that the concentration of food production into a handful of companies has helped change food production more in the past 50 years than in the past 10,000 years.
That concentration gives companies tremendous economic and political power—to influence government policy, what food is planted, how workers are treated and, ultimately, what America eats.
The film works best when it tells personal stories, such as that of Barbara Kowalcyk, whose son died at age 2 1/2 from E. coli poisoning. Kowalcyk has worked for six years to get legislation to give the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture authority to shut down plants that produce contaminated food, and it still hasn’t passed. When Kowalcyk is asked to say how her family eats differently now, she refuses to answer for fear that some food company will sue her for libel.
Some of the other examples of corporate power are even more disturbing. Food Inc. is a clarion call for revamping the way food is produced in this country.—Michael Hastings
