Food, Inc. packs a powerful message

Back in October Limelight magazine published my review of the documentary Food , Inc., which was slated for release on October 22.

Fore reasons best known to itself the distributor then decided to push back the release date by seven months - it has only just opened.

That means, of course, that enthusiastic reviews like this one, filed for what publicists call "long-lead media", were wasted.

In addition now the film is having to compete for an audience with another very fine ecological/ food-themed documentary, End of the Line, about over-fishing of the world's oceans, which has also just opened.


I saw Food, Inc. at last year's Melbourne International Film Festival and its powerful message has stayed with me to the point where I've started to change my food buying and eatng habits - trying to buy organic wherever possible.

Here's the (brief) review:

FOOD, INC. Duration: 94 minutes Genre: Documentary Four stars

"Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about fast food, Supersize Me, was entertaining enough but didn’t tell us much we didn’t already know (ie. a diet of fast food is really bad for your health).

Robert Kenner’s documentary about the corporatisation of US food and agriculture tells you plenty you probably didn’t know. That is unless you’ve read the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, one of the film’s expert witnesses, and learned for example how 80% of US food production now revolves around the corn industry, with cows being raised to eat corn rather than their natural diet of grass.

That’s without mentioning the factory–farming of beef cattle in disgracefully over-crowded conditions similar to those of battery hens. As a result dangerous E-coli bacterium strains pose an increasing health threat.

Those are just a couple of the things I learned from Food, Inc. I also learned that independents farmers are a thing in the past. US farms are now owned by four or five big corporations who force their tenant farmers to reveal nothing about their methods to outsiders, a classic sign of guilt. Watching the filmmakers trying to sneak cameras into animal batteries raises the dramatic ante."

Find out more at director Robert Kenner's website.