Food, Inc.
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 by nalika
I went to watch Food, Inc. yesterday.
It was not only in line with what Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan were saying - Eric Schlosser does not only show up in the film but also is a co-producer, and Michael Pollan speaks a lot in the film.
The story itself was not so new if you have been following the food issues in the past several years - what this film tried to do, it seems, is to make the message even clearer, make it approachable for the general public, or should I say, the consumers.
Sort of a similar fashion how Stonyfield grew into the third biggest yogurt producer in the U.S., and Wal-mart trying to move into organic business - efforts to bring the alternative into the mainstream are happening, and they are not without criticism for having come so far from the hippy small-scale idealism-laden operation.
There was something I did not like about the film - they sort of overused the image of the little boy Kevin who died of E-coli poisoning in the hamburger meat. I can see the filmmaker used it a lot to generate the sympathy from the concerned mothers - if that was the only effective way to communicate, it just tells me something about the self-centeredness of people - only when their children are at the risk, they want to make chanegs - in other words, they do not care unless they consider their children are at risk. The parents' protective nature may be only natural, but sometimes it seems that they only want to protect theirs and not many others.
In a strange way this movie made me cry, for thinking how far we have come to the point where they had to make this kind of movie, for thinking how this will appeal to the general public in the U.S., while at the same time it may be possibly viewed as a technological marvel in the eyes of the Third-World farmers, and for thinking why the U.S. consumers deserve to execute their purchasing power to change the world for the better - is this another kind of the America-saves-the-world story?
