"Food, Inc."

By David Hudson on 06/11/2009

[Updated through 6/15]

"If we are what we eat, we're in big trouble according to Robert Kenner's enlightening if not groundbreaking documentary 'Food, Inc.,'" writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. "Following contemporary mainstream documentary filmmaking's popular recipe of equal parts talking head interviews and field reporting, 'Food, Inc.' engages in investigations and studies that have been around for a while now about the steroidal industrialization of American food production: it's no surprise that authors Eric Schlosser ('Fast Food Nation') and Michael Pollan ('The Omnivore's Dilemma') are the film's two major presences. But 'Food Inc.' is important in scope if not discovery, and the large territory it surveys allows it to make crucial connections between the act of buying groceries and illegal immigration, corporate patented seed, and tainted food."

"[W]hat 'Food Inc.' lacks in revelation, it makes up for in intellectual rigor," writes S James Snyder for Artforum. "'Food Inc.' closely parallels the structure of another smart and scathing documentary, 'The Corporation' (2003), which chronicled the ways that corporate America exploits and destroys the world's natural resources, all the while bribing its way out of adequate monitoring and regulation. That, too, was a film steeped less in provocation than in insight and analysis, stringing together a series of detailed case studies to advocate a central thesis."

"The complicity of politicians that represent the organization they're meant to regulate is crucial, but is hardly just a matter of people being duped by faceless corporations," argues Simon Abrams in Slant. "'Food, Inc.' provides a pat indictment of our own complicity, but one that is absorbing enough in its multifaceted presentation that it actually makes you want to learn more."

"Some of the film's scariest moments fall in 'X-Files' territory, like the hidden camera footage of snorting pigs stampeding in a too-small shed, or the nightmare vision of unrecognizable offal being pulled skyward by a conveyor belt," writes Robert Sietsema in the Voice. "Despite occasional episodes of spiritual uplift, the film cultivates a feeling of paranoia as it progresses, so that none of the printed nostrums flashed over the final credits ('You can change the world with every bite') can dispel the notion that we and the earth are permanently and irretrievably fucked."

"'If we put glass walls on all the mega processing facilities, we would have a different food system in this country,' says one commentator, summing up 'Food, Inc.'s' central premise," notes Gabriella Gershenson in Time Out New York. "Agribusiness heavyweights - Tyson, Monsanto, Smithfield - refused to go on the record, reinforcing the film's claim that the industry wants to hide its practices from the public."

"Participant Media also published a paperback companion that further explores issues raised in the film, and shipped it to bookstores in advance of the film's theatrical release." Stephen Snart in the L Magazine: "By suggesting alternatives in a controlled, persuasive manner, 'Food, Inc.' distinguishes itself from social awareness ego-trips like Richard Linklater's pedantic adaptation of 'Fast Food Nation' and from the scores of fear-mongering documentaries that criticize without offering solutions: Michael Moore, Charles Ferguson, etc take note."

"Our food is, quite literally, killing us," writes IFC guest critic Melissa Anderson, "whether through E. coli-contaminated hamburger meat or the high-fructose corn syrup that's the main ingredient in extremely cheap products stocked on grocery shelves and found in fast food restaurants, leading to sky-high rates of morbid obesity and Type 2 diabetes." On another note, "why Kenner didn't talk to any advocates of vegetarianism is puzzling."

Nathan Rabin suggests one possible answer at the AV Club: "In keeping with the pragmatism of the Obama era, 'Food, Inc.' doesn't agitate for vegetarianism or a complete overhaul of the system, though like Upton Sinclair's simpatico novel 'The Jungle' before it, it's destined to inspire some short-term vegetarians. Its heroes are realists who've found a way to be relatively humane within the system, like a farmer who kills his animals the old-fashioned way or an organic outfit that sells its wares through Wal-Mart."

"'Food, Inc.' is part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces," writes Kim Severson in a backgrounder for the New York Times. "It's eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all."

"After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner's 'Food, Inc.,'" writes New York's David Edelstein, "I gave up the thought of 'reviewing' the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else's kids if you don't."

Updates, 6/12: "Forget buckets of blood," advises Manohla Dargis in the NYT. "Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, 'Food, Inc.,' an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You'll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch."

"Although 'Food, Inc.' will inevitably be compared to 'An Inconvenient Truth' (and there are undeniable similarities), it actually represents an earlier stage in the activist process," writes Andrew O'Hehir, introducing his interviews, in various formats, with Kenner and Pollan. "The latter film used a well-known public figure to galvanize widespread opinion on an issue that was becoming mainstream. In my conversation with Michael Pollan, he said the food-activism movement in 2009 is roughly where the environmental movement was in 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day. 'Food Inc.' is meant to be an opening salvo that gets people's attention, not the battle that wins the war."

"'Food, Inc.' is essential viewing," declares Gary Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. NPR's Steve Inskeep talks with Pollan.

Update, 6/14: Nicki Gostin talks with Pollan for Newsweek.

Update, 6/15: "While 'Food, Inc.' may not do a great job of assembling the bigger picture, it emphatically gets across that the picture is big," writes Farihah Zaman in Reverse Shot. "The film impressively portrays the sheer magnitude of the industrial food production problem, particularly via apt if obvious aesthetic choices. Kenner frequently employs aerial shots that simultaneously illustrate the amount of land devoted to industrial farming and reference American iconography of wild, open spaces tamed by human toil; indoor shots are likewise wide, always aimed at capturing the mind-boggling amount of everything, from potatoes to pig carcasses to crippled chickens."

[Photo: "Food, Inc.," Participant Media, 2008]

Tags: Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Robert Kenner