Review vastly too long and now over. Now, almost a week later, I don't have as much ranting and bile within me for the "how to change the world" proposed section of this post, so here's the short and sweet version: watching "Food, Inc," the obvious solution to me was the bleakest one: there are just way too many people on this planet for us to continue living in this way. And by "living in this way," I'd like to imply that there is a huge cultural aspect to the general world-is-ending problem, but specifically in the problem addressed by "Food, Inc." Basically, I see it boiling down to an American cultural desire and belief that everyone can achieve whatever they want, which is all fine and good until people start expecting to be able to eat whatever they want all the time, and cheaply. This leads to weird shit, like tomatoes in winter and fresh swordfish in the Midwest. Which would be fine if people wanted to pay the exorbitant costs of being able to eat what would be considered luxury food items in a natural world. But instead, agribusiness sees the opportunity to make a little cash and, using the power of capital to invest and coordination of transportation and all sorts of technology, manages to provide these food items (which should be considered artificially occurring) for a relatively cheap cost. Then lots of people buy them (because everyone wants to be able to do whatever they want whenever they want) and agribusiness gets very rich and can use this capital to keep on perpetuating the system. The people are happy because they can have sushi in North fucking Dakota and get food for vastly cheaper, freeing up more money to spend on useless shit like cable TV with nothing on and third cars and what have you. I'm starting to lose it here, but I hope you catch my drift. Main points: people want whatever they see everyone else having, especially the wealthy. They also want cheap things. Agribusiness uses their clout and all sorts of unnatural production and transportation measures (read bad for the planet) to provide what the people want for less. Then agribusiness profits while the people are contented, and the cycle perpetuates.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to get at the problem in its entirety, because everything connects. In order to deal with this problem in its entirety, we'd have to solve for poverty, a way for people in large urban areas to get food directly from the farmers, a way for the price of good food to go down, a way to get people to listen, and oh my god my brain just short circuited from not being able to deal with this mess that we've managed to get ourselves into. A practical solution is for people to just realize, culturally, that if you live in the Northern hemisphere, you can eat tomatoes in the summer, and can preserve them for the rest of the year. Or that certain foods should be really expensive because of the energy that goes into producing them, like beef. Little things like that. I'm finding myself turning into a crotchety old man these days, and one of my favorite refrains is for a return to pre-industrialized revolution society, when there was no globalization and you only worked when there was work needing to be done. I realize it's an impractical ideal, and that there was mad plague back then, but there's something to be said for living a more natural lifestyle, one where we ate what was in season or around, and didn't haul food from all the corners of the globe to fill our ravenous western appetites. I think that if we can manage to think (as Michael Pollan says, bringing it all home) about where the food comes from, and realize that if certain foods don't make sense (like non-seasonal fruits and veggies), we probably shouldn't be eating them, then we'd be on a clear track to fixing this problem of food ceasing to be real food.
And the impractical solution? Jack up the price of gas, vastly improve public/rail transportation, and bring back a village lifestyle to rural communities. People would have to focus on eating locally (too expensive to transport lots of food all over the goddamn place), and farming villages would be able to provide the food by rail to the major urban areas. Also, village life seems so cool. Go read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and tell me that's not how we should all be living (minus the incest). And hopefully the pandemic won't come around just yet, because that will be nature's solution to this problem, reducing the number of motherfuckers on the planet demanding more food than they could possibly need, and eliminating the number of dudes out there who start blog posts and don't finish them for a week, thus forgetting everything they wanted to say and consequentially ranting aimlessly to the finish.
Righteous Anger: "Food Inc."
Before I begin, this is going to be a little rant-y and digressive and angry as far as reviews go, and I have a strong feeling that this reaction is exactly what the filmmakers wanted. But the question is, how to direct the anger? Make a big change and start buying local produce? Go after the agribusiness conglomerates? Go completely off the grid (as one friend is doing), as it were, living entirely vegan off of fruits and berries? I choose the other option, namely blogging about it for the internet to read, and then letting everyone make their own decisions after I've criticized their ways.
I think a movie review is in order before the ranting begins. "Food Inc." is our subject for today, a documentary with heavy input from both Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan and a tone somewhere in between. It's wide-reaching in its specifics, but the basic target is agribusiness and how our food has become so preposterously mechanized and industrialized. This takes on a merry cinematic assault on the various large corporations and their evils: inhumane conditions for animals, inhumane conditions for workers, putting chemicals into food, lack of sustainable farming practices, and a general deviation from all that is natural and good. Unfortunately, that's a lot of subjects for a single movie to hold, especially one that I remember clocked in at about ninety minutes. This leads to a kind of disjointed feeling in the otherwise logical presentation of arguments. However, the arguments are all pretty simple- by looking for cheaper and easier food, we've managed to tacitly induce a world in which agribusiness corporations milk us for our money in exchange for environmental aberrations and food that doesn't make us much healthier. A few of the segments are especially good, though, such as one in which the Monsanto corporation is exposed; they managed to patent a gene in soybeans (which, in addition to corn, make up the vast majority of our food, says the film) that made the soybeans resistant to pesticide. Because they patented a gene, they've made it so that if a farmer saves seeds from non-patented soybeans, the farmer can legally be charged with patent infringement. Evil shit right there. There's also the sad story of a young boy who died from e. coli as a result of agribusiness negligence, the standard tales of how we are breeding chickens and cows to grow unnaturally large, so large that they basically are grown like plants (because the poor animals can't walk or move on their own accord). And then the animals get to be mistreated on their way to slaughter, which takes place in all of eleven (I think it was eleven, in any rate some preposterously small number) slaughterhouses in the country. The bad guys largely remain faceless, except for some semi-morally ambiguous characters (a farmer perfectly content to make money off of unnatural chickens, Wall-Mart execs expanding into organic food), and the heroes are many: farmers fighting the power, being abused, or simply shaking their heads sadly about the decline of their noble profession. The best are one semi-nutty farmer in Virginia, who takes a rather gung-ho approach to growing the best food he can naturally and locally, and another farmer who sadly bemoans the state of soybean growing, but offers the closing words of hope in such a rousing manner that I couldn't help but be moved to cheer inside. But for all the heroes, stories, angering statistics and discussions with Eric and Michael, the film still doesn't offer much new advice. Basically we know it all: buy locally, read labels, learn what's in your food, and every one can make a difference. I guess after all that stored indignation I was prepared for more of a manifesto, a shared plan for the audiences to meet up and rebel, schematics for kidnapping money-grubbing execs, but instead it's just the same schtick that we grew up hearing. Anyways, my final judgment here is that this is a standard documentary, a little boring in some of the CGI infographics but with above-average interviews; while the end message is not new, it is still hopeful, which is important, and the powerful drive that the film arouses in viewers can definitely be put to a good use, so long as viewers aren't overwhelmed and fail to do anything.
Review vastly too long and now over. Now, almost a week later, I don't have as much ranting and bile within me for the "how to change the world" proposed section of this post, so here's the short and sweet version: watching "Food, Inc," the obvious solution to me was the bleakest one: there are just way too many people on this planet for us to continue living in this way. And by "living in this way," I'd like to imply that there is a huge cultural aspect to the general world-is-ending problem, but specifically in the problem addressed by "Food, Inc." Basically, I see it boiling down to an American cultural desire and belief that everyone can achieve whatever they want, which is all fine and good until people start expecting to be able to eat whatever they want all the time, and cheaply. This leads to weird shit, like tomatoes in winter and fresh swordfish in the Midwest. Which would be fine if people wanted to pay the exorbitant costs of being able to eat what would be considered luxury food items in a natural world. But instead, agribusiness sees the opportunity to make a little cash and, using the power of capital to invest and coordination of transportation and all sorts of technology, manages to provide these food items (which should be considered artificially occurring) for a relatively cheap cost. Then lots of people buy them (because everyone wants to be able to do whatever they want whenever they want) and agribusiness gets very rich and can use this capital to keep on perpetuating the system. The people are happy because they can have sushi in North fucking Dakota and get food for vastly cheaper, freeing up more money to spend on useless shit like cable TV with nothing on and third cars and what have you. I'm starting to lose it here, but I hope you catch my drift. Main points: people want whatever they see everyone else having, especially the wealthy. They also want cheap things. Agribusiness uses their clout and all sorts of unnatural production and transportation measures (read bad for the planet) to provide what the people want for less. Then agribusiness profits while the people are contented, and the cycle perpetuates.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to get at the problem in its entirety, because everything connects. In order to deal with this problem in its entirety, we'd have to solve for poverty, a way for people in large urban areas to get food directly from the farmers, a way for the price of good food to go down, a way to get people to listen, and oh my god my brain just short circuited from not being able to deal with this mess that we've managed to get ourselves into. A practical solution is for people to just realize, culturally, that if you live in the Northern hemisphere, you can eat tomatoes in the summer, and can preserve them for the rest of the year. Or that certain foods should be really expensive because of the energy that goes into producing them, like beef. Little things like that. I'm finding myself turning into a crotchety old man these days, and one of my favorite refrains is for a return to pre-industrialized revolution society, when there was no globalization and you only worked when there was work needing to be done. I realize it's an impractical ideal, and that there was mad plague back then, but there's something to be said for living a more natural lifestyle, one where we ate what was in season or around, and didn't haul food from all the corners of the globe to fill our ravenous western appetites. I think that if we can manage to think (as Michael Pollan says, bringing it all home) about where the food comes from, and realize that if certain foods don't make sense (like non-seasonal fruits and veggies), we probably shouldn't be eating them, then we'd be on a clear track to fixing this problem of food ceasing to be real food.
And the impractical solution? Jack up the price of gas, vastly improve public/rail transportation, and bring back a village lifestyle to rural communities. People would have to focus on eating locally (too expensive to transport lots of food all over the goddamn place), and farming villages would be able to provide the food by rail to the major urban areas. Also, village life seems so cool. Go read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and tell me that's not how we should all be living (minus the incest). And hopefully the pandemic won't come around just yet, because that will be nature's solution to this problem, reducing the number of motherfuckers on the planet demanding more food than they could possibly need, and eliminating the number of dudes out there who start blog posts and don't finish them for a week, thus forgetting everything they wanted to say and consequentially ranting aimlessly to the finish.
Review vastly too long and now over. Now, almost a week later, I don't have as much ranting and bile within me for the "how to change the world" proposed section of this post, so here's the short and sweet version: watching "Food, Inc," the obvious solution to me was the bleakest one: there are just way too many people on this planet for us to continue living in this way. And by "living in this way," I'd like to imply that there is a huge cultural aspect to the general world-is-ending problem, but specifically in the problem addressed by "Food, Inc." Basically, I see it boiling down to an American cultural desire and belief that everyone can achieve whatever they want, which is all fine and good until people start expecting to be able to eat whatever they want all the time, and cheaply. This leads to weird shit, like tomatoes in winter and fresh swordfish in the Midwest. Which would be fine if people wanted to pay the exorbitant costs of being able to eat what would be considered luxury food items in a natural world. But instead, agribusiness sees the opportunity to make a little cash and, using the power of capital to invest and coordination of transportation and all sorts of technology, manages to provide these food items (which should be considered artificially occurring) for a relatively cheap cost. Then lots of people buy them (because everyone wants to be able to do whatever they want whenever they want) and agribusiness gets very rich and can use this capital to keep on perpetuating the system. The people are happy because they can have sushi in North fucking Dakota and get food for vastly cheaper, freeing up more money to spend on useless shit like cable TV with nothing on and third cars and what have you. I'm starting to lose it here, but I hope you catch my drift. Main points: people want whatever they see everyone else having, especially the wealthy. They also want cheap things. Agribusiness uses their clout and all sorts of unnatural production and transportation measures (read bad for the planet) to provide what the people want for less. Then agribusiness profits while the people are contented, and the cycle perpetuates.
Of course, that doesn't even begin to get at the problem in its entirety, because everything connects. In order to deal with this problem in its entirety, we'd have to solve for poverty, a way for people in large urban areas to get food directly from the farmers, a way for the price of good food to go down, a way to get people to listen, and oh my god my brain just short circuited from not being able to deal with this mess that we've managed to get ourselves into. A practical solution is for people to just realize, culturally, that if you live in the Northern hemisphere, you can eat tomatoes in the summer, and can preserve them for the rest of the year. Or that certain foods should be really expensive because of the energy that goes into producing them, like beef. Little things like that. I'm finding myself turning into a crotchety old man these days, and one of my favorite refrains is for a return to pre-industrialized revolution society, when there was no globalization and you only worked when there was work needing to be done. I realize it's an impractical ideal, and that there was mad plague back then, but there's something to be said for living a more natural lifestyle, one where we ate what was in season or around, and didn't haul food from all the corners of the globe to fill our ravenous western appetites. I think that if we can manage to think (as Michael Pollan says, bringing it all home) about where the food comes from, and realize that if certain foods don't make sense (like non-seasonal fruits and veggies), we probably shouldn't be eating them, then we'd be on a clear track to fixing this problem of food ceasing to be real food.
And the impractical solution? Jack up the price of gas, vastly improve public/rail transportation, and bring back a village lifestyle to rural communities. People would have to focus on eating locally (too expensive to transport lots of food all over the goddamn place), and farming villages would be able to provide the food by rail to the major urban areas. Also, village life seems so cool. Go read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and tell me that's not how we should all be living (minus the incest). And hopefully the pandemic won't come around just yet, because that will be nature's solution to this problem, reducing the number of motherfuckers on the planet demanding more food than they could possibly need, and eliminating the number of dudes out there who start blog posts and don't finish them for a week, thus forgetting everything they wanted to say and consequentially ranting aimlessly to the finish.
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