Food, Inc.

I have to admit, I’ve been avoiding this movie since it came out. It’s definitely a subject I’m interested in, but for some reason I was hesitant to sit down and watch it. Maybe because I can’t eat French fries since seeing Supersize Me, and I can’t even look at ground beef since reading Fast Food Nation. What would I not be able to eat after Food, Inc? I was dreading it.

Turns out, it wasn’t as bad as I thought. On the one hand, Food Inc. exposed the evil side to almost every type of food we eat – beef, pork, poultry, corn. Not even seeds were safe from this film. But on the other, I didn’t feel like what they were saying in the film was really new information. Maybe its just the world that we live in now, that this kind of information barely registers as shocking, but I was a bit disappointed after all the hype, that it wasn’t more of a life changing experience.

The things I did like about the film were how it divided up the stories into neat
little packages, and then brought them all back together at the end. It was a nice way to present so many different layers of information without confusing the audience. I also liked that it ended with a list of action items for how people can make a difference in their own small way. I find that a lot of films about environmental and food topics tend to be fairly doom and gloom, so it was refreshing to hear someone say that shopping at the farmers market was changing the world.

I also really liked the story of the low-income family, and how they made decisions about what food to buy their children based on calories. Maybe because I’m interested in the subject of healthy food access already, but I thought it was great to hear from real people about the issues that go into food choices, like deciding between diabetes medicine or buying fresh vegetables. It’s the kind of thing that is intellectually discussed, but rarely do you hear it verbalized by people who know from personal experience.

Overall I thought that Food, Inc didn’t have very much new information to offer, but it did package a lot of related information about our food culture in an easy to digest way (excuse the pun).