Food, Inc.

This looks like an absolute must see. A couple of years ago, the NY Times came out with a devastating magazine article (I wish I could remember the title, dammit) detailing the horrors of US food production with emphasis on cows, chicken and pigs as all three species are systematically turned into frankenfood laced with antibiotics, excrement and steroids. After reading the reviews of Food, Inc, it appears director Robert Kenner has performed the same service using film as the medium of choice.

If you’ve read either “Fast Food Nation” or “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” you won’t be surprised by what the movie shows and tells about the killing floors and soybean fields. Chances are that you’ll still be appalled, which is to Mr. Kenner’s credit. Much as Mr. Schlosser does in “Fast Food Nation,” the movie takes a look at the animal abuse in industrial food production — including clandestine images of sick and crippled cows being prodded to join the rest of the ill-fated herd — but its main focus is on the human cost. It’s a cost visible in the rounded bodies of a poor family that eats cheap if filling fast-food burgers for breakfast and in the obscured faces of farmers too frightened to go on record about Monsanto, the agricultural biotech giant.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” - Benito Mussolini