Movie Critic Duped

June 12, 2009
Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant

By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: June 12, 2009

Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.

Divided into chapters dedicated to points along the commercial food chain — from farm to fork, to borrow a loaded agribusiness phrase — the movie is nothing if not ambitious. “There are no seasons in the American supermarket,” the unidentified voice intones in the opening scene, as the camera sweeps the aisles of one such brightly lighted, heavily stocked if nutritionally impoverished emporium. From there the director Robert Kenner jumps all over the food map, from industrial feedlots where millions of cruelly crammed cattle mill about in their own waste until slaughter, to the chains where millions of consumers gobble down industrially produced meat and an occasional serving of E. coli bacteria. Read More

There are a couple of reasons to share this article with you. The first one is that it is a good example that shows people don’t even have to go to the movie to think they have learned something. Movie critics that know nothing about agriculture or food production will not spend anytime checking to see if the movie is accurate. They are only going to regurgitate the agenda of the filmmakers. The other thing that caught my eye in this review was when the critic made the claim that cattle are getting fed e.coli. Somehow trying to infer that that’s how e. coli get’s into the food chain. If that’s what the movie is telling people, then Pollan and Kenner are blatantly lying to consumers. Nothing could be further than the truth. E. Coli lives naturally in the rumen of cattle regardless of how they are raised.