You won't think about food, glorious food in quite the same way after partaking of "Our Daily Bread," opening tonight at the Regent Square Theater, Edgewood, for a four-day run.

	"Our Daily Bread," at the Regent Square Theater tonight through Thursday, shows how assembly-line efficiency is a constant in food production. Click photo for larger image. 'Our Daily Bread' Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Rating: Not rated but PG-13 in nature for mature subject matter Web site: www.ourdailybread.at

Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter says, "The images used in ads, where butter's churned and a little farm's shown with a variety of animals, have nothing to do with the place our food actually comes from." Animal life and death and everything in between come courtesy of antiseptic assembly-line efficiency.

Filmed in Europe between October 2003 and 2005, "Our Daily Bread" is a documentary about food production that shows how apples are washed in what looks like an Olympic-size swimming pool, how potatoes are harvested, how salmon are vacuumed out of a fjord, and how cows are zapped in the head, sliced open so fluids can gush out, skinned and sawed into progressively smaller slabs.

It's enough to make you a vegetarian, although Geyrhalter uses no narration or interviews or even identifiers to tell you where the hens are laying eggs or the guts are spilling out of the pig carcasses or the laborers are tenderly picking lettuce. That lends a purity to the project but also a sense that something's missing.

Interspersed throughout are shots of workers on quiet meal breaks, seemingly oblivious to their roles in the food-making machinery.

"Our Daily Bread," with its matter-of-fact approach, seamless editing and artful shots of scenes beautiful and brutal, is no "Fast Food Nation." Still, it makes you think that old-fashioned farm life -- raising and killing what you later put on the table -- might be far more humane after all.

Not rated but PG-13 in nature for subject matter.