Food Inc. Takes on Food Industry, and Vice Versa

I'm kind of surprised that anyone would be shocked by the documentary Food, Inc. Yes, a tiny number of companies controls a vast majority of the food chain. Yes, most animals are raised in filthy, cramped conditions and have been so successfully bred for size that they have evolved into mutant creatures that couldn't survive on their own if they weren't slaughtered for food. Doesn't everybody know that already?

Apparently not. "I was warned not to eat before seeing Food, Inc.," one reviewer wrote. "Unfortunately, no one told me I might never want to ingest anything ever again."

More notably, the meat and poultry industries feel threatened enough that they've come together to launch a website specifically tackling the "myths" of Food, Inc. (Though all of the major players -- Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto, etc. -- declined to be interviewed for the film itself, the documentary tells us -- a claim Monsanto disputes on its own Food, Inc. web page.)

"The truth is the chicken industry produces, processes and markets chickens and chicken products in a safe, responsible manner that delivers wholesome, high-quality products to consumers at affordable prices," the National Chicken Council said in a statement responding to the film.

Okay, but what does that mean? Are they actually trying to argue that the cramped chicken coops depicted in the movie don't really exist? You can debate whether such conditions are horrible and unsafe or just practical and cost-efficient, but you can't dispute that they're real. After all, the poultry industry opposed a bill in California requiring that animals be "confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely."

A lot of the things the food industry takes issue with from the film -- antibiotics, corn subsidies, the relationship between meat and climate change -- have already been debated ad nauseum, with both sides citing their own statistics and other research, and I won't go into those various debates here.

But I think the main argument of industry groups is one Food, Inc. already addresses. Basically it comes down to "the small-scale system advocated by Michael Pollan et al. would not be enough to provide the world with affordable food" versus "the current system is not sustainable in the first place, and 'cheap' food is only cheap because we're not counting the true health and environmental costs." In my view, those statements aren't contradictory; they're just looking at the issue from a different perspective. One is, "under current policies, we're doing things in the most reasonable, safe, profitable and affordable way we can" and the other is, "yeah, but maybe we need to take a look at our current practices and policies." Food companies will naturally resist any sort of changes to the system, but as changes become inevitable, they will adapt -- as restaurants are doing on the calorie-labeling issue, for example.

I enjoyed the film, but overall, I think if you're familiar with Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," little in the documentary will be new to you, and I imagine that if you've read Eric Schlosser as well (which I haven't), you've heard pretty much everything.

I agree with the New York Times that "for people steeped in food politics," the most shocking section is the one about Monsanto's attack on farmers who use patented seeds -- even if their farms were contaminated accidentally by neighboring farmers. Though I also agree with the AP critic that "this is such a complicated topic, it almost feels like it belongs in its own movie or TV special."

My favorite scene involved Wal-Mart representatives going to organic farms and meeting new suppliers who tell them bluntly, "We've never been to a Wal-Mart. We've been boycotting Wal-Mart for years." And I liked that Wal-Mart was featured in a (slightly) positive light, along with other gigantic corporations that have responded to consumer demand by offering more products that are organic, local, free of artificial hormones, free-range, grass-fed, or some combination of all of the above. The movie annoyed me early on by tossing out the phrase "multi-national corporation" in a sinister matter, as if the phrase is automatically synonymous with evil, but later on it seemed to drop that meaningless and simplistic approach in favor of a more comprehensive and realistic look at what our food system has evolved into and what can be done about it.