We live in a fallen world with an undeniable, innate need for redemption. Everywhere around us we see stories of the hero who strove against insurmountable odds and left the world better than he found it. I honestly believe this, rather than malice, is responsible for the majority of garbage with which we’re brainwashed every day. In the last decade, hard-hitting documentaries tearing down preconceived notions have become all the rage. I’ll applaud almost any effort to check the status quo, but the challenger’s responsibility doesn’t end there. Truth, not an attack on the existing system, is of the utmost importance. For the consumer of information presented in such documentaries, it helps to follow the old adage You ought not believe everything you hear.
Earlier today, a friend announced that she might become a vegetarian, a comment which was immediately followed by her asking, “Have you guys seen Food, Inc.?” I took exception to the idea that anyone could watch an even-handed documentary on a subject so typically characterized by passionate activism and actually make an informed decision about a lifestyle change. Such films follow the same tired formula: show scary images, throw frightening statistics at the viewer, include the grieving loved-ones of a person tragically affected by the target of the film, and reinforce the message that the filmmakers are underdogs and on the side of the Average Joe. Even documentaries on the History Channel have been known to spice up the facts a bit, so my approach to the evidence presented by theatrically-released documentaries has always been one of extreme skepticism. In the discussion with my friend, I admitted that while I’ve read several scathing reviews of the film, I had yet to see it myself. So having given my thoughts on the general nature of feature-film documentaries, I figured it only right that I give the filmmakers 93 minutes of my time. After all, it was available for instant streaming on Netflix.
I found it rather ironic that the film opens with a critique of the marketing imagery used to sell food in modern America: namely, that picturesque scenes of the classic American farm are supposed to assure the buyer that everything from butter to cereal is “farm fresh.” A fair critique, no doubt, yet one that is effortlessly pointed right back at the filmmakers. Their use of scary imagery, unnerving words, and alarming statistics to shock the viewer into accepting their truth claims is hardly morally superior. Crowds at a film festival might stand a cheer for the validation of their existing beliefs, but this sort of shoddy research wouldn’t stand a chance in the peer-reviewed world.
A favorite go-to in the film is to talk of the “multi-national corporations” and their “world deliberately hidden from us.” It’s great propaganda. To someone approaching the film uncritically, it sounds very horrible and foreboding. Yet it is never explained why a multi-national corporation in itself is a bad thing: the filmmakers are merely relying on the viewer’s existing social bias against it, developed after years of hearing charges against multi-nationals in the news and from other social activists. “The Industry” is time and again railed in the film for… giving people jobs? Yes, the fact that people in the US are not forced to work a particular job and are instead voluntarily working for these corporations seems to escape the filmmakers. If people are working a particular job, it’s because that’s the best one they can find. Is everything perfect? I’m sure it’s not. But without these corporations, the jobs just wouldn’t be there at all. But that’s beside the point; this is yet another place where this film delves into the irrelevant and wastes my time.
I will be the first one to invite people to seek truth and understanding in everything, to lift the veil. The American public is grossly ignorant of the entire farming and slaughter process, and the film’s director, Robert Kenner, knows it. This film does not invite the viewer to peek behind the curtain in context, realizing how little they know about the production life of most of the products they buy and use every day. Instead, Food, Inc. simply lifts the veil in front of the viewer, promising to show the truth when it is actually revealing a carefully coordinated sideshow horror, meant to get the viewer to accept the filmmakers’ truth claims on an emotional basis rather than to arrive at them as the result of proper academic pursuit. My friend’s words regarding what she saw perfectly express the sort of decision-making in which the filmmakers hope you’ll engage: “They’re so mean!”
(Before we continue further, can we all agree to put aside arguments stemming from the video clips of animals being abused? It’s heartbreaking, I know, but that’s the very reason they’re included: to elicit an emotional response. The fact that the videos exist does not prove that such practice is commonplace. Hog farmers, chicken farmers, and cattle farmers simply do not go into the business because they hate their animals, and the profit motive alone strongly suggests that these are extremely rare instances, something to be minimized and eliminated. It provides a beef producer no benefit to have its cows abused.)
Scene after scene of industrialized slaughterhouses and meat-packing facilities are shown along with the narrator’s condemnations, but does the viewer recognize that producing using such economies of scale has led to the greatest decrease in world hunger? That’s right, it was those evil multi-nationals, not a concert benefit or donation drive, that has done the most good for the greatest number of people. These video clips are, again, shown to suggest that the cold, faceless corporations are bad, bad people.
Insinuations abound with constant references to the farmers’ desire to make money, leaving the implication open-ended. Isn’t it obvious? Whatever they’re doing must be evil! But the film fails to provide any evidence that the use of hormones in animals (much like the use of pesticides in farming crops) results in a negative impact on humans. Activists have tried for years to draw a link, and the best they can come up with are proclamations that the powerful farming industry doesn’t want us to know the truth. Meh. Not very convincing.
Also not very convincing? Carole Morrison, the former Purdue chicken farmer who was dropped by the company due to her farm lacking proper modernization. So when she trudges through her own chicken houses complaining about the filth and the crowding, it’s hard to draw a conclusion other than that she’s a pretty lousy chicken farmer. If she’s concerned about the conditions of the chicken houses, maybe she should clean them up herself.
I find it hard to accept the statistic thrown on the screen following Morrison’s story: the typical chicken farmer borrows over $500,000 and only earns $18,000 per year. If that’s true, the typical chicken farmer is beyond moronic and could easily fare better in a much less labor-intensive job, but I suspect there’s something else to those stats they’re not telling us. (My girlfriend, whose uncle is a chicken farmer, scoffed at this figure.) Regardless, the message is clear: the big chicken companies are ambivalent toward their customers and corrupt in their dealings with chicken farmers.
I don’t expect movies to be factual. I generally expect them to be entertaining, and that usually involves weaving a creative storyline. But when a film comes along claiming to be important and informational, with an investigative reporter as one of the primary interviewees, it had well better pursue truth rather than facts to fit a narrative. But who wants to let facts get in the way of a good, powerful story, right?
Now think about the film in a different (enlightened, if you will) context: proponents of the organic food movement are having a hard-time selling their idea based on the results and would rather you not focus on the incredible contributions to human existence that farming technology has made in recent years. As Blake Hurst, a farmer for over 30 years, writes in The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals:
Critics of “industrial farming” spend most of their time concerned with the processes by which food is raised. This is because the results of organic production are so, well, troublesome. With the subtraction of every “unnatural” additive, molds, fungus, and bugs increase.
In addition to painting a pleasant picture of organic farming, they also attack the more modern methods. Reality check: the move to go organic, if fully successful, would send us back to the agrarian age. Organic farming crop yields are far too low, and would only be able to feed a fraction of the population fed by modern farming techniques. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Delimma and interviewee in the film, even admits that modern farming has allowed corn growers to produce 200 bushels per acre where a farmer could only grow a tenth of that a century ago. Would proponents of organic farming really condemn us back to a world of such low output? If they’re concerned at all about protecting natural resources, they should be promoting efficiency with cropland. In the article I Don’t Care Where My Food Comes From, Ronald Bailey points out that “organic production typically yields a third less food than other means. That means that more land is being plowed down, leaving less for forests and other wildlands.”
(Incidentally, the Vice President of the American Corn Growers Association, Troy Roush, rightly notes in the film that the vast expansion in corn crops is largely due to Government subsidies which allows growers to produce below the cost of production, but wrongly blames such policy on the shadowy “large multi-national interests.” There they are again, the Food, Inc. boogeymen! Ironically, such Government policy has far more to do with environmentalists’ push for gasoline alternatives and politicians’ desire to appear like they’re doing something to save the planet. When the corporations’ lobbyists cozy up with closely aligning interests and ready-made legislation, it just makes the politicians’ job that much easier. The result: corn subsidies to produce ethanol, who cares what happens to the rainforests!)
And again, there is just no evidence to the claims that these modern farming techniques do harm to the environment or humans. In fact, Hurst points out that he has a much lower environmental impact now by using herbicides and engaging in no-till farming.
Biotech crops actually cut the use of chemicals, and increase food safety. … Herbicides cut the need for tillage, which decreases soil erosion by millions of tons. The biggest environmental harm I have done as a farmer is the topsoil (and nutrients) I used to send down the Missouri River to the Gulf of Mexico before we began to practice no-till farming, made possible only by the use of herbicides. The combination of herbicides and genetically modified seed has made my farm more sustainable, not less, and actually reduces the pollution I send down the river.
“We’re entitled to know about our food. Who owns it, how are they making it, and can I have a look in the kitchen?” says Pollan. Yet do buyers of organic foods know any better where their foods come from than me? Or is it a nice psychic salve to heal the guilt brought on by prolonged exposure to agenda-driven films like Food, Inc.? Bailey notes that it’s precisely the fact that we don’t have to be concerned with the full production life of every good we purchase that has given rise to so much prosperity for everyone in the West.
One of the great glories of modern life is the enormous elaboration of the division of labor and how the efficiencies gained from that division makes people much wealthier than they could otherwise be. Since we all don’t have to stitch our own clothes, bake our own bread, compound our own medicines, or even cook our own meals, we are all much better off.
The film is pretty slick with most of its statistics. One example is about 26 minutes in when Eric Schlosser of Fast Food Nation states, “There’s always been food poisoning. As more and more technology is being applied to the production of food, you’d think it would be getting safer, not more contaminated. But the processing plants have gotten bigger and bigger… it’s just perfect for taking bad pathogens and spreading them far and wide.” [Cue ominous news stories played on ratings-starved 24-hour news channels.] Notice the red-herring? If the food supply was truly becoming less safe, he would have some statistics on it and would have said so explicitly. Instead, he narrated over video of industrialized factories while he assured us that such factories could potentially spread bad pathogens (as opposed to good pathogens, I suppose).
The reality of the situation is far, far better, as Bailey notes:
Food today is cheap, nutritious, and safe. The last century has seen a vast improvement in food quality and safety. In millennia past, food and water were the chief sources of many deadly diseases. Consider that as recently as 1933-35, a U.S Public Health Service survey found that 5,458 children between the ages of 1 and 15 died from diarrhea and enteritis, most caused by food-borne pathogens. By contrast, a recent survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that just 29 Americans died of food-borne illnesses between 1993 and 1997. Meanwhile, stomach cancer rates are down by 75 percent since 1950 because old-fashioned food preservation techniques like salting, pickling, and smoking have been replaced by refrigeration.
Hurst, the farmer, notes that organic proponents often leave the consumer out of the equation entirely or imply that consumers’ pocketbooks are resilient to an increase in food prices.
If you think [consumers] don’t [benefit from cheap food], just remember the headlines after food prices began increasing in 2007 and 2008, including the study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations announcing that 50 million additional people are now hungry because of increasing food prices.
He goes on to make clear the point that these intellectuals banging the drum for humane animal farms seem to be woefully ignorant as to why the animals are treated the way they are. Rather than learn from someone who has been doing it his whole life, these “agri-intellectuals” saw something that offended their naive sensibilities and launched several campaigns against it.
I’m still proud of my win in the Atchison County Carcass competition of 1969, as it is the only trophy I have ever received. We raised the hogs in a shed, or farrowing (birthing) house. On one side were eight crates of the kind that the good citizens of California have outlawed. On the other were the kind of wooden pens that our critics would have us use, where the sow could turn around, lie down, and presumably act in a natural way. Which included lying down on my 4-H project, killing several piglets, and forcing me to clean up the mess when I did my chores before school. The crates protect the piglets from their mothers. Farmers do not cage their hogs because of sadism, but because dead pigs are a drag on the profit margin, and because being crushed by your mother really is an awful way to go. As is being eaten by your mother, which I’ve seen sows do to newborn pigs as well.
In another example of intentional misleading, Food, Inc. tries to tie Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to Monsanto, a big, evil multi-national vilified in the film. Several things they failed to mention, though, that drastically neuter the charge that his decision was the result of his association with Monsanto:
- Justice Thomas worked as an attorney for Monsanto in the 70′s, many years before they entered the biotech or seed business.
- Thomas was part of a 6-2 decision which upheld decisions by the appeals court and lower courts.
- There is no evidence that Thomas had any financial holdings in Monsanto when he wrote the majority opinion or since.
- And finally, Monsanto wasn’t even a party in the court case mentioned.
When a film is so willing to play fast and loose with the facts, you’d better take a more skeptical approach.
Another great irony in the film is that after spending almost 40 minutes railing against the competition, additives, and farming techniques that put downward pressure on prices, the film profiles a Latino family struggling to make it on the few dollars they earn. The film shows them getting a full meal thanks to Burger King’s dollar menu compared to the family actively budgeting at the local market. I’m honestly not sure what they’re trying to show here. That forcing the country (through Government controls) to move to far less efficient organic farming techniques would somehow not push prices up beyond the family’s reach? The filmmakers’ logical leap staggers the imagination.
Aside from the strange, wandering, and all too frequent personal stories, the film relies far too much on the naivety and sympathy of the American public in an attempt to garner support for lobbying efforts to increase regulation. (I would obviously argue that the film itself proves the ineffective nature of regulation, but those with faith in government somehow always seem to see the same evidence as proof of the need for more Government programs and regulation.) My heart goes out to the woman who lost her son to E. coli, but detailed descriptions of their struggle with him in the hospital and him begging for water were wholly unnecessary, assuming this whole film was supposed to be an honest presentation. But then again, this wasn’t trying very hard to be a reasoned debate on the safety and health of the food supply. (Wait, was that even what it was trying to be? Rather, it seemed to be a shotgun approach using every conceivable tactic to get the viewer to forgo standard meat and grains in favor of organic. I think.)
“We put faith in our Government to protect us,” the mother declares, upset that her faith has been shown hollow. That’s a huge problem. Government simply cannot take care of us in the way we’ve come to expect it. It cannot be a good mother. It can only be a heavy-handed, tyrannical nanny. But faith in this whole belief system, not just in Government, seems to under gird this entire organic movement. At least Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, admits that he’s part of a movement preaching a new religion of sorts.
I can find an anecdote to make any point I wish to make, so heartbreaking though the mother’s story is, it doesn’t successfully argue that everyone in America should endure stricter regulations (which lead to decreasing quality, increasing price, creating monopolies). I don’t mean to sound cold-hearted, but it’s not an outbreak when one or two people get E. coli. “Outbreak” is yet another charged word that’s being used to push an agenda, and words fail to have meaning when they’re used so arbitrarily. (Epidemic was also used to describe obesity in the film– another misuse that is sadly becoming commonplace. Not only is our method of measuring obesity in this country still relying on a horribly inaccurate index based on the stats of 5,000 Scottish soldiers measured over 150 years ago by a politically enterprising Belgian sociologist, but an epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease within a community at a particular time. When our system of measure declares Brad Pitt overweight and George Clooney obese, I dare say the “obesity epidemic” is no epidemic at all.)
It should be no secret that the makers of Food, Inc. are fierce environmentalists who see our method of food production as contributing heavily to global warming, and though they readily admit several times in the film that technological advances over the last 100 years have allowed us to be more efficient with farmland and feed more people with less energy, the cognitive dissonance is apparently not a problem. They still find the solution in returning to an agrarian age. Such a theory wanting greatly for evidence, however, the filmmakers resort to shock-value tactics like showing videos of animal slaughter to an audience ill-equipped to properly judge the content.
Amidst the strange contradictory philosophies this film conveyed (including the surprising implicit appeal to Capitalism right before the credits rolled) the one resounding message I did receive from the film was this: lobby the Government for more regulation and move the entire food industry to organic. Yet the inability for a small group of elites at the top to properly command an economy, especially one as large as the US, is still knowledge yet to reach the ears of such environmentalists. Can they not see how fraud and collusion are built into the regulatory system? The problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right regulators! The redemption of this world, however, will not come because a few (or many) activists convince those in office to force the mighty and uncaring hand of Government upon the rest of us.
I’m rather disappointed that anyone could be swayed by this film. I was expecting to engage in some heavy fact-based debunking, but the vast majority of the arguments made in the film are appeals to emotion. The film drags, too, and I’m left wanting a central thesis. As best as I can tell, the film would better be separated into 4 or 5 very short films, though I can’t promise I could bear to watch them all.
In the end, the problem with this film and other misdirected calls to action is this: it gives people false assurance, empowers them with emptiness, and calls them to place their hope in something so fleeting, if even good. Our hope cannot be in the things of this world. We’re should not only be good stewards of this world, but wise in our dealings. Is it really wise to take information presented in a hyped documentary at face value?
So what do you think? Have you seen the film or read similar books, and what’s your opinion? Have you decided to go organic and/or buy local? Have you learned how to be more discerning in not only the products you buy but in the information you digest?
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