“After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both are in the film). But every frame makes you choke on your popcorn—if for no other reason than the focus on government-underwritten corn and the companies who put it into everything from soda to Midol to the gassy, E. coli–ridden bellies of factory-farmed cows. The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing—it touches on every aspect of modern life. It’s the documentary equivalent of The Matrix: It shows us how we’re living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. We humans can win, but we should hurry, before Monsanto makes a time machine and sends back a Terminator to get rid of Schlosser and Pollan. — David Edelstein
Edelstein on Food, Inc.
June 11, 2009 by at 10:38 am
Huh. And we just watched "King Corn" a few days ago. Based on Edelstein's review, it sounds like Kenner's won't be as balanced.
By the way, since you mentioned "Darkon" I might recommend "Confessions of a Superhero".
Also not to be missed (but completely unrelated to industrialized agriculture and LARPing) "Unborn in the U.S.A.", a remarkably honest film which grew out of a project by a couple of Rice students.
Good of you to give this a shout-out. Couldn't you find a way to hang out with these people – like write a food book?? I promise to stop dumping on homeopathy if you do! MJH
Sounds like a deal, NMN. I do have a pitch in about a Monanto-like company, but we know better on that one, I suppose…