Food, Inc is the elephant, and we’re all the proverbial blind folks feeling it up, trying to figure out what it is. Is it a lefty attack, a prophetic message, a gross-out, a commercial for organic food?
Well, yes, on that last point, if you’re a sustainable foods shopper, organic farmer, or progressive farm policy advocate, Food, Inc’s scenes of factory farming and meat processing are going to feel like a confirmation of your life choices. If you’re a rancher or traditional commodity crop grower, however, Food, Inc might feel like an assault on your way of life. If you’re new to the idea of food as industry, Food, Inc is going to blow your mind and leave you scrambling for solutions to what you were shown.
And that, at least, is a very good thing.
I thought Food, Inc was going to be a real “preach to the choir” sort of documentary (and it is that, to a degree), but it will blow minds. I say that because the film deliberately follows the lead of Michael Pollan’s bellwether book and cultural phenomenon, The Omnivore’s Dilemma which has, I believe, done more than any other phenomenon since the eighties’ alar scare to push the organic/sustainable foods agenda. Working in natural foods stores since the nineties, I watched OD‘s effect on people firsthand, as new customers showed up in my store, pre-loaded with the talking points that my grocery co-ops had been trying to push for a decade. It was a true cultural phenomenon.
But Food Inc is going to succeed in a way that The Omnivore’s Dilemma never could, never will — because it’s a film. Movies, especially documentaries, allow the viewer behind veils in ways that text simply cannot. The word autopsy means, literally in Greek, to “see with one’s own eyes” and that’s what Food, Inc does: It performs an autopsy on the industrial food industry so that we can see how it works with our own eyes. The movie takes viewers inside a poultry barn with several thousand chickens (lame or sick from fattening too quickly) and a farmer who’s clearly disgusted by her work. It shows the Brazil-like inner workings of a modern beef processing plant, where the meat of over a thousand cattle create a single burger (literally). And it shows real people suffering real tragedies, like Barbara Kowalcyk who lost her 2-year-old son Kevin from e. coli infection, and, afterward, worked to lobby a law that would allow the USDA to shut down meat plants that endanger the public (the bill, called Kevin’s Law, is shot down during the course of Food, Inc). Allowing audiences to bear witness to food production is this film’s unique power over The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and it’s not to be underestimated.
But bearing witness isn’t fun or easy. More than one critic has commented that Food, Inc is tough to watch, and they’re right. Despite meat processing plants being shot in a stock that subdues the bright reds into black, Food, Inc doesn’t pull punches. Slaughter house workers abuse lame cattle with loaders. Chickens get kicked, and we see how a “kill floor” looks and operates. It may persuade some, but Food, Inc is also going to turn stomachs, and make enemies, too.
But the most important stories that Food Inc tells are not gross-out bloodfests. They’re the stories of farmer autonomy in the face of utterly insurmountable corporate power. America needs to understand that we’ve allowed Monsanto complete power over life, the genetics of crops, and the farmers who save Monsanto’s seeds (watch veep of the National Corn Grower’s Association squirm like a fish on a hook when asked about Monsanto’s patents on corn — corn growers still don’t like it). For a country that prides itself on fierce independence, it may be much harder to watch Monsanto lawyers badger and ruint he life of a perfectly innocent, elderly farmer than all the bloody kill floor scenes combined.
My only problem with Food, Inc, is that it’s short on answers to all these oppressive, mind-boggling problems. Bromides like “shop at faarmers markets” won’t do anything to give our governemnt the power to stand up to corporations who abuse public trust. And “eating organic” is a great idea, but even that seems somewhat empty as presented Food, Inc.
For example, Gary Hirschberg, CEO of Stonyfield Organic Yogurt is offered up as an optimistic realist who sells organic yogurt to Wal-mart because it creates opportunity and financial sustainability to organic dairy farmers. What could be better than getting organic food on the shelves of the biggest retailer in the world to advance the organic agenda, right?
But as Stonyfield grows, the danger grows of creating an industrial organic model no different than the one villified elsewhere in Food, Inc, a model that drives down prices to farmers in order to maximize profits and efficiencies elsewhere in the corporation.
Indeed, organic dairy farmers called Gary Hirschberg out on price last year, in a remarkable exchange on Grist. Said one farmer who supplies milk to Stonyfield:
“I’m losing up to 60 cents per gallon producing milk for the Stonyfield brand. I’ve used up my line of credit, I’m close to maxing out my credit card because of spiraling feed and fuel costs.” He adds, “Last fall, I and many other organic farmers told both Stonyfield and [dairy giant] HP Hood what was happening and we were given a 3 cent per gallon increase. Now another 8 cents starting on April 1. This is a slap in the face.”
Hirschberg responded with farmer testimonies of his own and that Stonyfield had increased payment for milk by 34% between 2003-2008. Ed Maltby of the Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Association then countered that Hirschberg’s numbers were wrong, that dairy farmers were really suffering, and invited Hirschberg to tour some organic dairies with him to see the suffering with his own eyes.
Does that tension between farmer and corporation sound familiar? It’s not just Monsanto, Cargill, Smithfield and their farmers who suffer from it. That tension between individual farmer and corporate goliath suffuses every corner of American agriculture to one degree or another — even a niche market like organics. As Michael Pollan has said elsewhere, “I am not an enemy of bigness. But my fear is that all the patterns of industrial agriculture will be repeated. If organic food merely mirrors the industrial food chain, we haven’t made any progress at all.” And selling to Wal-mart, famous for pressuring its vendors downward on price, certainly isn’t the answer.
Despite that, this film is a gem and its impact will be felt for years, I’m certain. When it goes to video, in particular, I expect we’ll see conversations sparking all over the country about corporate control of food, farmer autonomy, seed saving, the spirit of organics, and what we eat. And that’s exactly how change will come about.
Eventually.
If Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield lived up to his own earth-frendly sustainable standard he wants to hold everybody else to, Stonyfield would only sell 2-oz. starter-culture sizes of yogurt, instead of full-size ready-to-eat portions, such as 32-oz containers.
Think about it. Got milk ALREADY where you live – Grade A, Pasteurized, Organic, Irridescent, or Whatever? Then what do you need to make 32 ounces of yogurt? Thirty ounces of milk and a 2-oz. starter culture — and a time/temperature protocol anyone who can scramble an egg can follow. You also need a whopping-big dedicated capital investment of a saucepan, candy thermometer, and glass jars – which can be reused thousands of times over.
And guess what? The last two ounces of a batch of your homemade yogurt becomes the starter culture for the NEXT batch – ad infinitum via the miracle of friendly bacteria — just like with making real sourdough bread.
If cows only lived within a 50-mile radius of a Stonyfield yogurt plant, then, well, the only way to have yogurt is for Stonyfield to make it en toto then ship it to all compass points. But where ever you find human beings, chances are good that you’ll find cows — and their milk — already not far away.
Catching my drift now? The only way Stonyfield can exist as a yogurt-making company is to use bulk buying power to beat down the price of milk, the main ingredient of yogurt, to the absolutely cheapest possible price — to the detriment of the milk producers. Only on that basis does Stonyfield have the opportunity to make a profit in the milk-to-yogurt conversion.
Food production decentralization. That’s the antidote to Food Inc. the movie. It starts with a something as small as potted pepper or tomato plants on a porch or balcony, and it includes homemade yogurt.
Oh yeah, also forgot. When you make homemade yogurt in reusable glass jars — NO PLASTIC CONTAINERS!!!
and as long as both sides see it as black and white the longer we will have no solutions.
we’re not going to be all organic any time soon and we should not expect that some farming will always be industrial in size and efficiency.
if you ever worked on a small farm you can quickly see the disadvantages of being small and huge costs that create for food prices. its a tough problem that in my view will take more creativity then just bashing the bad guys and hoping everyone will go organic next week.
this web site has an interesting viewpoint to expand on and asks the hard questions and i like the thinking that goes on here.
Thanks for popping by, anonymous. I hear you on the gray areas between industrial and small, conventional and organic. To play devil’s advocate, though, that gray area didn’t simply appear one day on its own. It took some staunch advocacy and bold risktaking to recreate a market where consumers might entertain any non-industrial, non-commodity farmed food, let alone product from the organic fringe.
It won’t surprise you that I think bashing bad guys is extremely necessary. It’s way too easy for corporate food companies to pose as small, mom and pop operations, for industrial ag to disguise itself as family farms. This is Fair Food Fight’s mission — to unmask, to rally, and to excite people about real food. Indeed, it’s why we fight.
Frankly, I think it’ll take even more advocacy, activism, and risktaking (and chair throwing, and bashing of bad guys) to drag the behemoth of US agriculture further into the gray area you’re describing. I welcome it. We need more authenticity and transparency of ALL kinds in our food system.