Paying a price for cheap food

john lui, Straits Times 29 Jul 09;

FOOD, INC. (PG)
94 minutes/opens tomorrow/

The story: This documentary reveals how cheap food may have come at too high a price to human health, happiness and the environment.

All those who wish to hang on to whatever is left of their innocence of how food is produced, stay away from this documentary.

Modern agricultural practices are portrayed here as a hollow joke played on consumers. Logos of merry milkmaids and smiling cows on food packages beguile buyers into thinking that such things still exist when the truth is closer to The Matrix's meat battery cells than to Anne Of Green Gables's rolling pastures.

For example, that red thing that we think is a tomato? It may look like a tomato, but put it in one's mouth and it is clear that it is something merely genetically engineered to look good and last longer on the shelf, not taste good.

The film confirms almost every nagging suspicion most people have had about dirt-cheap fast-food hamburgers and fried chicken: Some day, the piper must be paid.

Almost everywhere that the cameras want to go is off-limits, thanks to the security policies of the major agricultural companies that run rural America. At one location, a chicken pen that raises fryers, where a disgruntled employee-farmer lets the cameras in, the scene sticks in the mind: a floor thick with birds, bred with breasts so big their scrawny legs cannot support their lopsided weight, causing them to sway and fall like drunken sailors.

It is one of a few scenes of visceral impact in the movie, which otherwise comprises less-than-riveting diagrams and figures along with footage of environmental damage, obese people and sad small-town farmers in torn overalls.

Film-maker Robert Kenner, who has made other documentaries on blues music and famous World War II battles, imbues Food, Inc. with a gentle, folksy feel, as if it were a very long insurance advertisement.

But make no mistake, this is a one-sided polemic based in part on the works of authors Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation).

It puts the blame on greedy corporations and their stooges in government and largely gives a free pass to the cheapskate consumer and to the efficiency-fixated, time-starved culture that allowed the problem to arise in the first place.

It makes some very valid points about how cheap food is hurting animals and ruining our health and the planet, but the film does act a little like a candy coating for a truth that may be even harder to swallow than a tomato that tastes of nothing.