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Once upon a time, movies were all about whetting your appetite for food and the attendant passion on screen. Those were fictional stories with groaning boards of Italian, French, Mexican or other delicacies that set you racing for the nearest restaurant the minute you burst out of the theater.
Now, documentaries are likely to destroy or depress your appetite as filmmakers show chickens bred for such rapid, unnatural growth that they cannot waddle or stand, animals ankle-deep in manure that trails them to the slaughterhouse, and farmers who play David to food corporations' Goliath but never slay the giant.
As a matter of fact, they're more likely to be sued, squeezed out of business or simply brought under the corporate thumb.
That's the view in "Food, Inc.," opening today at the Manor Theater in Squirrel Hill. It's enlightening, frightening, educational, often one-sided due to corporations that refused comment, and, frankly, a bit overwhelming.
Director-producer Robert Kenner collaborated with authors Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma"), in investigating the disconnect between our food and those bucolic scenes on the cartons, tubs, boxes and other packages lining supermarket shelves.
The marketers may lean on images of agrarian America -- farmers, 1930s-style houses and silos, endless expanses of green grass -- but the mega-corporations that sell us our food are anything but.
"Food, Inc." advances the notion that factories, not farms, are often "assembly lines where animals and workers are being abused." It traces revolutionary changes in the business to McDonald's and the eventual domination of the meat business by three or four companies.
The beefiest part of the film, so to speak, focuses on chicken farmers.
A spokesman for the National Chicken Council suggests that producing a large amount of food on a small amount of land for an affordable price is not a bad thing. But that means chickens are bred for unnaturally fast growth and kept in constant darkness in crowded conditions amid dust and feces.
Even if you don't care about animal welfare, you may sympathize with the chicken farmer who invests $500,000 on corporate-mandated poultry houses and earns just $18,000 a year.
"Food, Inc." also investigates how and why corn is king, and what that means for human and cattle diets, why some families have easier, cheaper access to fast food than to fresh vegetables, and how a hamburger with E. coli killed a 2-year-old boy and turned his mother into a food-safety advocate.
If you think the government will keep your family safe, "Food, Inc." provides lots of reasons to disabuse you of that notion. It starts with far fewer FDA safety inspections and dips into the cross-contamination between attorneys for corporations such as Monsanto (which has a stranglehold on soybean seed patents) and the U.S. government.
"Food, Inc." casts a wide net, examining the toll of "faster, fatter, bigger, cheaper," the way companies churn through illegal workers, and what happens when Monsanto sues an older Indiana farmer for "inducing farmers to break the patent law through his seed-cleaning business."
- Rating: PG for some thematic material and disturbing images.
- Web site: www.foodincmovie.com/
In the tradition of advocacy documentaries, "Food, Inc." picks its targets and takes aim, even scrambling the word "evil" into the chapter title "[The] Veil" and making sure the music underscores the message.
It doesn't forget to include farmers trying to do the right thing, although it relies too much on a Virginian and suffers from the stony silence of its subjects. Perhaps corporate spokesmen thought their words couldn't be twisted if they offered none, but they appear guilty by their refusal to sit for interviews or allow cameras onto their property.
"Food, Inc." does not leave us in the darkness like top-heavy chickens bound for slaughter. It demonstrates that consumers do have power, as with Wal-Mart's customer-driven decision to stock milk from cows not treated with growth hormones, and offers a list of suggestions for better eating.
It closes with a Web site address (www.takepart.com/foodinc) and list of suggestions, some of which are boilerplate and some of which are difficult to follow in a climate such as Pittsburgh's. It's much easier to get cheap, fresh produce in July than, say, January.
Like "Super Size Me," "Fast Food Nation" or artful "Our Daily Bread," "Food, Inc." will make you brake for local farm markets, squint at ingredients on packages, and pause as you raise that burger to your lips. Plenty to chew on, in other words.
