On WFF #3: Big bad food, again
Decider previews the Wisconsin Film Festival
Maybe it's because this is Madison, home to the nation's largest farmers' market, CSA farms galore, a thriving food co-op, and emphasis on local foods that nothing in Food, Inc. (April 3, 9:45 p.m., Orpheum Theatre) seemed new to me. The documentary, from the producers of An Inconvenient Truth, explores the mechanized underbelly of the nation's food industry and includes graphic shots of confined animal feeding operations, meatpacking plants, and poultry sheds. It's a disturbing look at the way the American food system works and the effects this system has on anyone who eats as well as the farm workers, animals, and planet.
It's narrated in part by Michael Pollan and Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser. But in circles where Michael Pollan has become as ubiquitous as Oprah, and with all of the recent coverage about tainted peanut butter, and before that, E. coli in our spinach, is anyone not aware that our food system is seriously messed up?
For those remaining Madisonians who aren't, Food Inc. will prove a depressing, slightly grotesque (especially for weak-stomached meat eaters) wake-up call. It's a lot of doom and gloom, and unlike other food movies of recent years, like Super Size Me and King Corn, not all that entertaining. Farmer Joel Salatin, a major figure in Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, who owns and operates a self-sustaining poultry-and-pig farm in Virginia, redeems the film with some much-needed, infectious enthusiasm for what can be done to save our food system. In an otherwise depressing movie, he offers a tiny ray of hope that people can make a difference.
For more Wisconsin Film Festival previews, please see the On WFF archive.
