Film Review: Some frightening, tough 'Food' for thought

''Food, Inc.'' posits that industrialized farming, with big subsidies for such crops as corn, has created a world in which a fast-food cheeseburger is cheaper than a head of broccoli.Magnolia Pictures

"Food, Inc." peels back the shrinkwrap, product labels and cheery "pastoral fantasy" farmland logos that dress up our supermarket products to reveal a corporate-controlled factory system where both "the animals and the workers are being abused," at the cost of cheap but unhealthy -- even dangerous -- food.

''Food, Inc.'' posits that industrialized farming, with big subsidies for such crops as corn, has created a world in which a fast-food cheeseburger is cheaper than a head of broccoli.Magnolia Pictures

"The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you're eating, because if you knew, you might not want to eat it," testifies one of the film's food experts, drawn from a roll call that includes traditional and factory farmers, scientists, environmentalists and authors Eric Schlosser ("Fast Food Nation") and Michael Pollan ("The Omnivore's Dilemma"). Both those writers are investigative journalists, a fact that helps us place this alarming documentary within the noble muckraking tradition of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" (name-checked in the film), the 1906 novel that helped clean up the meat-packing industry.

Photographed and co-produced by veteran filmmaker Richard Pearce (director of the Memphis episode of the Martin Scorsese PBS series, "The Blues"), the movie can perhaps be faulted for touching too many bases during its relatively brief 93 minutes. Topics -- some of which illustrate the many unpredictable consequences of U.S. factory farming -- include illegal immigration, the obesity epidemic, Third World food shortages, the patenting of soybean seeds and "veggie libel laws," which enabled the National Cattlemen's Beef Association to sue Oprah Winfrey for "food disparagement" after she made a dismissive remark about hamburgers on her show in 1996.

One heartbreaking interlude focuses on a mother who became a consumer advocate after the death of her 2-year-old son from burger meat tainted by the E. coli virus. But the message that pierces this cascade of information is easy to grasp: The industrialization of farming -- enabled by the government subsidizing of such dominant commodity crops as corn, wheat and soybeans -- ensures that a McDonald's cheeseburger is less expensive than a head of broccoli. And that can't be good, can it?

The movie alternates gross-outs with messages of hope. Viewers may be distressed to learn that many of the cattle they consume spend much of their time ankle-deep in their own feces, while the chickens they eat cluck out their short lives in windowless poultry prisons where they never develop the strength to move their unnatural, bred-to-be-breast- heavy bodies more than a few steps. But director Robert Kenner also chronicles the rise of the organic food movement, and points to tobacco regulation as a model for consumers who want greater oversight of factory farming. ("You can change the world with every bite," is the film's activist slogan.)

Unfortunately, the voice of the multinational corporation is absent, for the most part, so we don't hear any arguments -- whatever those might be -- to explain why consumers should be glad that only four meat-packing companies now control 80 percent of all beef. Tyson, Monsanto and Perdue wouldn't participate in the film, according to Kenner; however, Wal-Mart -- typically a bogeyman in documentaries with a "progressive" environmental viewpoint -- is given props for stocking organic foods, a decision that has helped to make the growing anti-industrial farming movement more profitable.

"Food, Inc." is playing exclusively at Malco's Ridgeway Four.

-- John Beifuss, 529-2394

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