Food, Inc.: An Expert’s Pastoral Fantasy

Following a pattern similar to Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the Talking-Heads documentary Food, Inc. attempts to illustrate how the American supermarket reflects both the changes in our food and our nostalgia for a pristine agrarian past when, at least in what the narrator claims is “a pastoral fantasy,” the fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy we eat came directly from the family farm. Images of farmers and farms are used to sell a multitude of supermarket products, 47,000 in an average grocery store, according to the narrator. In a store where tomatoes are sold year-round, and meat and poultry are sold without bones, however, according to this narrator, a “deliberate veil” has been constructed between food and its source, the narrator explains. 

In reality, food is produced in a factory, not on a farm, the film claims, so that “now food is coming from enormous assembly lines where both animals and workers are abused.” With help from contrasting images of these factory farms, interviews, and voiceover narration, Food, Inc. attempts to show how corporations control food from seed to supermarket. The film’s assertions are weakened, however, not only because of an over-reliance on the authority of a narrator, but also because the film argues its points from single examples, moving from the whole to the particular with a clear point of view that remains unsubstantiated.  

Many critics, however, regard the information the film attempts to convey, in general as “important.” For example, Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly argues that the film is “one that nourishes your knowledge of how the world works.” And John Anderson of Variety asserts that Food, Inc. “does for the supermarket what Jaws did for the beach—marches straight into the dark side of cutthroat agri-business, corporatized meat and the greedy manipulations of both genetics and the law.” According to Andrew O’Hehir of Salon.com, “the food-activism movement in 2009 is roughly where the environmental movement was in 1970…. Food, Inc. is meant to be an opening salvo that gets people’s attention, not the battle that wins the war.” 

Yet other critics find the film derivative rather than breaking new ground. Kyle Smith of the New York Post, for example, asserts, “The film offers very little that food radicals don’t already know. Journalists Eric Schlosser… and Michael Pollan serve as the packhorses, turning up to say things on camera they’ve been saying in print for years.” Smith also argues that charges made in the film remain unsubstantiated. Instead, we assert that the film does attempt to support its “charges,” but relies too heavily on individual examples to make its case. 

As an illustration, the film begins with a more generalized image of a factory and a businessman in a wheat field meant to reinforce the connection between farming and factories, as a narrator explains, “They don’t want this story told.” According to images and narration, however, industrial food production’s cause is connected to one company, the McDonald Brothers, who now control our food system, from beef, potatoes, and pork, to tomatoes and apples. From here the film highlights example areas of food production controlled by McDonalds, from chicken and beef production to the corn production that sustains them both.