With increasing public concern and awareness about climate change, food safety, health, immigration, and even swine flu, industrial agriculture’s grip on the American food and agriculture system is starting to loosen. Nowhere was this more evident than at the St. Anthony Main movie theater in Minneapolis on Sunday, where people filled an already packed theater—sitting on the floor and in the aisles—and where many others were turned away from the sold-out showing. For a 9:20 p.m. Sunday night time slot, I figured turnout would be minimal, and especially for Food, Inc., a documentary about the horrors of our industrial agriculture system. But instead, a rapt audience sat for 94 minutes as filmmaker Robert Kenner took us through the origins of U.S. industrial agriculture, the devastating consequences for workers, consumers, animals, and the environment, and how people are fighting back. As part of the 27th Annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Fest, Food, Inc. was billed as “one of the most radical” films of the festival.
With renowned writers and activists like Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin and Eric Schlosser, the film examines the illusion of choice and “diversity” in the typical American supermarket, and exposes the numerous hidden costs of our cheap food: appalling conditions in slaughterhouses—both for the animals and the exploited laborers, who are a disposable workforce composed primarily of undocumented workers (many of whom were farmers in Mexico before NAFTA drove 1.5 million Mexican farmers off their land) and people of color; destructive environmental consequences from Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) run-off and pesticides; and farmers who are in such debt to corporations that they have little to no choice about how to run their farms. And while agribusiness makes a huge profit, we are the ones who pay.
At the end of the film, audience members cheered at Food, Inc.’s call for activism and list of ways to break out of industrial ag’s stranglehold. And while most of the suggestions were positive (e.g., shopping at farmers markets), many were too focused on individual behavioral changes. After a powerful systemic critique, the film could have offered more systemic solutions; much of the ending emphasized market-based solutions, when more weight could have been placed on policy-level ones. When the rules at the policy level are stacked against organic/sustainable agriculture, market-based solutions are limited.
Watch for the film to be in local movie theaters soon.
