The Politics of Food
Posted on July 20th, 2009 in Agriculture, Film, Review |
Free range chickens
Last Thursday night I went to see the documentary film Food Inc. for free, courtesy of the restaurant chain Chipotle. Chipotle sponsored free screenings of Food Inc. in thirty-two cities around the country last week. I don’t mind playing into Chipotle’s marketing strategy here because, despite being owned by McDonald’s at one time, this company has been supporting local foods since at least 2001 when it began its “food with integrity” campaign. They have been ahead of the curve among chains in the local-food movement.
Agriculture is a major part of my family’s identity, but I’ve only recently developed a strong interest in the issue of local foods and organics. Both of my parents have their Ph.D. in agricultural economics, and for most of my life agricultural issues just bored me to death. I think this boredom stemmed from hearing my parents talk at the dinner table about the intricacies of crop subsidies, the farm bill, fluctuations in the price of sugar, trade barriers, etc. My mom works for the Government Accountability Office on agriculture and trade issues and my dad works at the USDA as a researcher, so you can imagine what these conversations were like. But aside from my parents’ professions, my mom grew up on a family farm in Madrid, Iowa, and I spent every summer until I was ten years old visiting my grandparents there. My grandparents had to sell their farm in the eighties when a lot of family farms across the country were facing serious financial problems.
While agriculture has always been a very personal issue in my family, I only became interested in it recently. My interest first began to develop while I was living in the Madison area of Wisconsin during the 2008 general election. The farmer’s market in Madison is enormous–it must be one of the largest in the country–and I was impressed by the influence of local agriculture in the area. The farms and farmland in southern Wisconsin are also strikingly beautiful, and I began to have a greater interest in farmers and their work. But it was only this year while reading Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals that agriculture began to become much more interesting to me. Friends of mine had been encouraging me to read this book for months, and I’m glad that I finally took their advice. It is a revelatory account of the industrial food system and the many ways that the sources of our food are hidden from view. Reading this book inspired me to become a more regular consumer of organic foods and a much stronger supporter of farmers markets and locally-based agriculture. So when I had the chance to see Food Inc. for free, it was perfect timing. As it turned out, Pollan is interviewed extensively in the documentary.
Food Inc. has received glowing reviews. Rotten Tomatoes lists it as receiving 97% positive reviews from critics. I’ve decided to add to the chorus of praise here because this is a documentary that is in the best tradition of films that have the power to change society from the bottom up. In fact, I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that Food Inc. may be to agriculture what An Inconvenient Truth has been to the debate about climate change.
Robert Kenner produced and directed Food Inc. with Eric Schlosser co-producing and having a major role in the film. Schlosser is a highly regarded investigative journalist and the author of Fast Food Nation, a book that I’ve also been encouraged to read for a long time but haven’t yet. I think I’ll be reading it very soon.
Food Inc. addresses many aspects of the industrial food system: the processing of our food, how processed foods affect human health, the deterioration in the livelihood of farmers, the mistreatment of animals, the damage that this system is doing to the environment, and alternatives to mass production of food. The movie’s political agenda is not very subtle–it is taking aim at the mega-corporations that control how most of our food is produced and distributed. Some may dismiss this kind of documentary as nothing more than propaganda, and yet, Food Inc. presents problems about the food industry in such a compelling way that I believe it will motivate many who view it to want to learn more about these problems and come to their own solutions. Some documentaries with political agendas affirm one’s own view of the world, or oppose it, without motivating the viewer to take further action. Food Inc. is not that kind of movie, and that is one reason I believe it works so well.
As in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the overproduction of corn plays a major role in Food Inc., but a greater focus is placed on the way that corn-fed cattle has resulted in the spread of disease in humans, with E. coli 0157:H7 being the main culprit. A moving segment of the film looks at the case of Kevin Kowolcyk, a 2 year old who died 12 days after eating a hamburger contaminated with E. coli 0157:H7. His mother began a campaign to require the USDA to enforce stricter standards for the inspection of meat and poultry in the United States. She finally persuaded Rep. Anna Eshoo of California to introduce the Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act, or “Kevin’s Law”, as it is referred to. The film clearly explains how corn-fed cows are more likely to be infected with E. coli because of the changes that corn causes in their stomachs. An additional danger is the mass production process which can all too easily result in meat with fecal matter on it passing through the meat packing process undetected. This is how humans contract E. coli from beef, a fact that is enough to make me want to avoid beef from corn-fed cows from now on. The Center for Disease Control reports that every year in the US there are 76 million cases of illness caused foodborne disease, with 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually.
Another disturbing aspect of the food industry that Food Inc. explores is the way that chickens, cows, and pigs are treated by the giant companies that process these animals for food. There are only a handful of companies that process almost all of the meat and poultry that Americans eat, and they have enormous pens where they house the animals in very close quarters. If the farmers try to change the way that the animals are housed, such as not keeping chickens in dark barns, the companies can terminate their contracts. One farmer portrayed in the film refuses to keep her chickens couped in dark barns with thousands of other chickens and her contract is terminated by Tyson. The poultry companies refuse to allow the filmmakers to even go inside a darkened chicken coup and they refuse to be interviewed. In fact, all of the major food companies refused to be interviewed for this movie, a fact that the director highlights frequently. The reason why the companies don’t want the public to see how the chickens are housed is not hard to discern: we would probably be disgusted if we saw how the chickens are treated and the unsanitary conditions in which they live in these giant coops.
The ways that cheap fast food and soda are damaging Americans’ health, especially that of the poor, is a third major issue in the film. One segment of the film follows a Hispanic family that frequently visits fast food chains for dinner because it’s cheap and convenient. It turns out that the father has diabetes. In one scene, the family is shopping at the grocery store and one of the young daughters is practically begging her parents to buy some fresh vegetables. But when her parents look at the price of the vegetables and compare it to the price of soda and other junk food, they decide not to buy the vegetables. Instead, they buy the junk food. Kenner films a scene of the children from this family in a classroom with other lower-income children and the teacher asks if they know someone in their family who has diabetes. Nearly every child raises his or her hand. When they are asked if they know two people in their family with diabetes, we see about the same number of hands go up. The reason why soda and junk food are such popular choices among the poor is because of the overproduction of corn. Excess corn is cheap and is easily converted into high fructose corn syrup, which is in our soda and in most of the processed foods at the grocery store. The ubiquity of cheap corn syrup in food and beverages has led to an epidemic of diabetes and obesity in the United States, with the poor being hit the hardest. From here it’s not hard to see the connection of the issues in Food Inc. to the most prominent political issue of the summer–health care reform.
These are just a some of the problems with the industrial food system portrayed in Food Inc. About half of the film is devoted to the evils of mass produced food while the other half is devoted to alternatives that may offer solutions. Kenner delves into the world of organic foods by interviewing the founder and CEO of Stonyfield Farms, Gary Hirshberg. One might expect Kenner to make an unambiguous case for organics in this film, but his presentation of Hirshberg and the entire orgnanic industry is more nuanced. While presenting the history of Stonyfield Farms and its impressive role in the organic movement, Kenner also shows Hirshberg making deals with Wal-Mart in its effort to tap into the organic market. At one point Hirshberg defensively responds to his “more radical” friends who criticized him for partnering with Wal-Mart by arguing that because of its huge customer-base, Wal-Mart’s purchase of Stonyfield products is helping to save the world. More revealing is when Hershberg is at an orgnanics convention and is asked what happens to these companies when they try to become as profitable and big as possible. Won’t they end up selling their soul for profits just as the other large industrial food companies did? Hirshberg’s response was essentially: we’ll have to wait and see.
Joel Salatan of the Polyface Farm
The most entertaining and inspiring part of the movie for me was the interview of a farmer from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, Joel Salatan. Salatan’s “Polyface Farm” is a “family-owned, multi-generational, pasteur-based, beyond organic, local-market farm” according to the website. First of all, this guy is a character. He talks fast and passionately about his land, his animals, and the importance of keeping his farming practice small enough to allow people to know exactly where they are getting their food from and how it is produced. The animals on his farm–pigs, chickens, and cows–roam around his land happily and freely. It is the kind of pastoral image of farms that we imagine used to exist before the disappearance of the family farm. Salatan and his farm had a prominent role in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so it was fun to see the colorful character that Michael Pollan wrote about so vividly. What Salatan and his farm represent is a different way to structure our agricultural economy if consumers would be willing to pay a little more for their food. Of course, the major objection to universalizing farms like Salatan’s is whether small operations like his could feed six billion people. In the movie, Salatan dismisses this objection with derision, but it seems like a serious problem to me.
If there is a flaw in Food Inc., I would say it is that it hews too closely to the model of An Inconvenient Truth and the Michael Moore style of documentary-making in that it doesn’t give much credence whatsoever to those with a different view. There is not even one significant interview with someone who disagrees with the director’s viewpoint. I understand the time constraints in a film like this one, and the intention of the filmmaker to present as powerful a case as possible for his view. Nonetheless, it still seems to me that excluding any opposing views hurts a documentary’s credibility. The question of whether it is feasible to feed billions of people using the methods of Joel Salatan are never even considered except for Salatan’s one sentence dismissal. Also, the fact that consumers pay lower prices thanks to the industrial food system does seem to me to be a major benefit of this system. The problem with organic food and farmers markets is that they are still a luxury of the educated and the wealthy. Until the cost problem is solved, I don’t see how me and my friends buying our groceries from Whole Foods and from farmers markets is going to dent the industrial food system whatsoever. So in that sense, Food Inc. fails to offer realistic solutions because it does not even try to engage these broader issues.
Despite this failing, I believe that Food Inc. is one of the most compelling documentaries I’ve ever seen. In my view, it has the potential to create serious changes in our economy because it will begin a serious dialogue among Americans about their food and the industrial system behind it. More than that, it will compel Americans who watch it to seriously reconsider their habits of consuming food. If this movie gains mass popularity, it could help grow the market for organic foods and the popularity of farmers markets. And just a slight change in consumer preferences based on this movie would constitute a significant achievement.
I’m not the first to say this, but all Americans need to see Food Inc.