Page 63 - Winter2009

Tim’s DVD Reviews

flesh grow faster than their bones, muscles and tendons can support. The tion is being run by the regulated corporations.
air is so foul (no pun intended), farmers need masks to walk through and The fox is guarding the henhouse. And this has
collect the dead bodies. been going on for about one hundred years. The
The ugliness doesn’t stop at how the animals are abused. As Joel system is not just corrupt, it is irredeemable. But
Salatin astutely points out, a culture that treats its animals with brutal we’re going to fix it … with more foxes to guard
disregard will be inclined to treat its people the same way. We see farmers the henhouse?
forced to build expensive chicken houses and go deeply into debt. On the I continue to wonder how many centuries it
average they make $18,000 per year and have little hope of ever paying will take before we notice that more regulation
off a $500,000 debt. So they are trapped, enslaved, too poor to stay in the isn’t working. They even show Joel Salatin ex-
business and too poor to get out. In Tar Heel, North Carolina we see illegal plaining the mindset of food factory executives.
immigrants lured into a giant Smithfield plant where working conditions When some part of the system starts to really
are reminiscent of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. After years of being treated break down, it never occurs to them that they may
like animals, they are unceremoniously deported. need to change the system. Instead they come
I have worked in large factories before but I have never seen a factory up with some high-tech brute-force approach to
or network of factories like the one run by Beef Products, Inc. It’s like keep the system going a little longer. This film
a factory on steroids. Not only is the South Sioux City, Nebraska plant is promoting contradictory messages. I can only
an endless maze of pipes, machinery and assembly lines, it has a control speculate that the producers or editors are suffer-
center that can monitor bulk tanks, adjust gearbox speeds, and regulate as- ing the adverse mental effects of factory food.
sembly lines in other plants in Chicago, Georgia, Utah, Kansas, Nebraska, Right after this excursion into contradiction,
Texas, Los Angeles, and Ohio. We see some pseudo-food slop make its we get a breath of fresh air on Polyface Farm.
way through machines and conveyor belts and the resulting unidentifiable We are treated to classic lines from Joel Salatin
slab is dropped neatly into a box to be shipped out. The slab turns out to like, “If we put glass walls on all the mega-pro-
be hamburger meat filler cleaned with ammonia to kill E. coli. cessing facilities, we would have a different food
We see the ruthless tactics that Monsanto uses to run innocent farm- system.” He makes the point that he doesn’t want
ers out of business. I’ll just briefly summarize by saying that anyone who to grow into one of those monsters. He has the
watches this movie and still has any respect for Monsanto either wasn’t right idea. We need to go back to small farms and
paying attention or is on their payroll. local economies. The film veers off course again
But the awful price of our factory food system doesn’t stop with the when we are led to believe that one good answer
animals and people directly working for the system. The end result is a might be for organic producers to get big like
population with steadily declining health and badly compromised immune Stonyfield and sell organic products at Walmart!
systems. We see the tragic story of a little boy named Kevin, who was a Of course, operations as big as Walmart are more
victim of the factory food supply. Then his mother marches off to Wash- interested in profits than quality, so they would
ington to lobby congress to pass “Kevin’s law,” a bill that would give the have to be regulated—oops! We’re back to that
USDA more power and “reform the system.” same problem again.
This is where I have to say, “Wait a minute! Stop!” One thing that can It is unfortunate that I have to give this film
make a tragedy even worse is to use it to promote a solution that is worse a THUMBS DOWN. With a little more editing
than useless. This movie has done an excellent job of portraying a food sys- it could have been great. Its coverage of the
tem that doesn’t work, is out of control and massively corrupt. In addition, dark side of the food system is powerful but the
we see Michael Pollan explaining in detail how the revolving door works suggested solution will only lead to more of the
between Monsanto, Cargill, etc. and government regulatory agencies like same.
the USDA and FDA. He goes through a long list of names with pictures
attached. He does a great job of making it clear that government regula-

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