Robert Kenner’s exploration of America’s food industry is all the more shockingly effective for being so calmly presented. There are no Michael Moore-variety pranks or eye-watering graphics in Food, Inc – just people telling their stories, each representing a different but telling aspect of America’s dysfunctional attitude to what America eats. Producers and consumers alike testify to the grim nutritional paucity of America’s plenty.
Kenner’s thesis is that the industrialisation and politicisation of food is literally poisoning us, and his statistical reinforcements are terrifying – a third of American children born this century, the film claims, will contract early onset diabetes. The solutions, as Kenner sees it, are infuriatingly simple: don’t feed livestock things they’re not supposed to consume, enforce existing regulations, and make healthy food affordable.
It’s perhaps best thought of as a cinematic accompaniment to Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation – Schlosser appears in the film, though cheerfully admits that his researches have not dimmed his appetite for hamburgers – and as further support for the adage that someone who respects the law, and likes sausages, shouldn’t watch either of them being made.
Andrew Mueller