His Take/Her Take: Food, Inc.

Worth the price of admission, or a waste of time? Brian McKechnie and Suzanne Ellis offer you their take on the latest movies hitting screens. Read their reviews every week, exclusively on CityNews.ca.

Let Brian and Suzanne know what you think of His Take/Her Take via email at brian.mckechnie@citynews.ca or suzanne.ellis@citynews.ca .

FOOD, INC.

Rated PG
Cast: Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser
Directed by: Robert Kenner
Official Site IMDb

A documentary about the food industry and who controls it.

Brian’s Take

**** out of 5 stars

Food is an essential part of life. Whether you eat it in a restaurant or at home it’s all the same. Do you ever stop to consider where it came from though? Not just the pork, beef and poultry but the corn, soy beans and tomatoes; how did they make it to your plate? What about all the food on the shelves at the supermarket? When you push that steel cart down the aisles do you ever wonder what’s in a majority of those packages and who is actually behind making it? If you don’t question these things you will after seeing Food, Inc.

Educational and scary, Food, Inc. pulls the curtain off the food industry and exposes the corporations and policies behind it. And it’s not pretty. Chickens that never see daylight, cows filled with antibiotics, vegetables ripened with chemicals and patented seeds that lead to independent farmers being charged for copyright infringement. That’s just the surface of the story. How a handful of companies control a majority of the world’s food and how inspection in the U.S. is at its lowest levels ever, leading to E. coli and other outbreaks, is the bigger picture.

Authors Michael Pollan ( In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser ( Fast Food Nation) tell the meat and potatoes of the facts. Entertaining at times and jaw-dropping at others, they inform rather than preach and lead the story well. Hearing from the farmers that are affected (independent and corporate) and the mother of a two-year-old who died after getting E. coli from a hamburger is where the film really woke me up to the reality behind this issue.

The one downside to Food, Inc. is that it’s very American. I would have liked director Robert Kenner to expand and show how other countries handle food; growing, regulation and inspection in Canada is not even mentioned. It would have also been nice to see some chefs explain the benefits of cooking with fresh food instead of spending time on a family who eats junk food because it’s cheaper (which felt forced for trailer fodder).

In the end Food, Inc. succeeds at making you aware of the issue and is a must-see. It will open your eyes, make you want to learn more and lead to discussions with friends and family. As the tagline says: You’ll never look at dinner the same way again.

Suzanne’s Take

**** out of five stars

A family trip to the supermarket is one of the most frustrating scenes in Food, Inc. A mother, father, and their two daughters (three of them are overweight, and Dad’s diabetic) trudge through the produce aisle, remarking that for the price of one head of broccoli they can buy two burgers at a fast food drive-thru. So more often than not, for reasons of finance as well as convenience, they choose the latter option.

The sad fact that it often costs more to eat healthy, whole foods than it does to consume the heavily-processed stuff is one of Food, Inc.‘s focal points. Directed by Robert Kenner and featuring authors Eric Schlosser ( Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan ( In Defense Of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma), the potent 93-minute documentary will make you question everything you eat, and leave you craving broad-scale changes to the food industry.

There are a number of weighty topics here – from the prevalence of corn in everything from ketchup to peanut butter to batteries, to the conditions under which cows and chickens are raised before being slaughtered, to the increased number of cases of illness and death linked to food contaminated with bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella.

Not surprisingly, many of the U.S. industrial food corporations mentioned in Food, Inc. declined to be interviewed for the project. Instead, we hear from individuals: Pollan and Schlosser, both eloquent and engaging speakers, Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, who feeds his livestock grass instead of cheaper corn-based feed, and Stonyfield Farm founder Gary Hirshberg, whose organic yogurt company is now the third-largest yogurt producer in the U.S.

Hirshberg’s story is one of the film’s bright spots, and shows that widespread change in food production is possible – consumer demand helped land his yogurt on Wal-Mart store shelves. In one of the film’s funnier moments, a dairy farmer admits to Wal-Mart executives that she’s never set foot in one of their stores.

But for every success story, there’s a tragedy. Director Kenner also interviews food safety advocate Barbara Kowalcyk, whose two-and-a-half-year-old son Kevin died from E.coli poisoning after eating a hamburger while on vacation. Scenes of a tearful Kowalcyk talking about her child, and home video of the youngster taken before he became ill, are heartbreaking. Kowalcyk is lobbying to give the U.S. Department of Agriculture the power to shut down plants that repeatedly produce contaminated meat — something you’d figure would be a no-brainer.

It does seem, given the growing locavore movement, in this country anyway, that changes are within the hands of the consumer. Will Food, Inc. be the push needed for a fundamental overhaul to the industry itself? Let’s hope so.