Some industrial practices are constructed as cruel in Hugo Latulippe’s Bacon: The Film through scenes of distressed piglets, which become portraits of infants taken by force from parents. These changing practices in industrial hog farms around Quebec are contrasted with pastoral scenes around the farm. But these scenes are devoid of farm animals, and shots outside slaughterhouses and images of hogs as food suggest there was no place for connections in this hyper-industrialized era.
Jason Young’s Animals, on the other hand, provides clear portraits of animals raised on a more traditional family farm. The film looks at the everyday slaughter of animals for food on the farm where the animals are personalized as pets with names before the slaughter.
Animals are included in the credits alongside their human filmmaker counterparts, as well, so the sentience of these farm animals is validated. These animals' faces are even reasserted onto the meat after their slaughter. In the film, actual slaughter of a rabbit and a yearling are shown, but we only hear the filmmaker's acts of killing. And although Young does decide to stop actually killing the animals on the farm, he and his family continue eating meat. As Young notes, this leaves him off the hook, not his favorite animals.
The message in Animals is ambiguous, then, but still points to the need to realize our meat comes from sentient beings. Despite their rhetorical weaknesses, these films articulate similar arguments against factory farming, as do popular U.S. food films such as Food, Inc. and King Corn, and European films such as We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread.
Nostalgic reminiscences serve a central role in a series of National Film Board of Canada documentaries. Beef, Inc., Bacon: The Film, and Animals all focus on the meat industry and its negative consequences, sometimes by connecting the negative environmental consequences of animal fecal matter and governmental policy.
These three films draw on nostalgia to emphasize the dangers of industrializing meat production, but they also individualize the animals being prepared for slaughter, applying an animal rights argument that constructs beef, hogs, and other food source animals as sentient. To make their arguments, all three films take a synthetic approach to documentary that pursues interviews, portraits, and nature documentary approaches.
Carmen Garcia’s Beef, Inc. and Hugo Latulippe’s Bacon: The Film both rely on tropes of unveiling and talking head interviews to demonstrate problems with fecal waste and slaughtering practices. Although the filmmakers for Beef, Inc. did not have access to the slaughterhouses, the absence of visuals and critical commentary on blood and flesh may move beyond shielding the self from the source of the foods we eat to the shock of absence of the pastoral cattle image from the process.
Latulippe's Bacon: The Film concentrates on the negative effects Quebec hog farming is having on air and water toxicity levels. To highlight a nostalgia for both a more animal and earth-friendly approach to hog farming, the film individualizes the hogs on this industrial farm through broad-based portraits, visuals of artificial insemination and separation from the mother, moving us toward what look like more ethical approaches to feeding our craving for meat.
We Feed The World juxtaposes industrial and traditional farming techniques in ways similar to those used to critique industrial fishing when exploring other foods: tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants, and onions. According to one expert, natural vegetables are better tasting and more efficient because farmers can reuse the seed, but seed companies are owned by a few companies and are subsidized, so genetically modified seed and hybrid vegetables have become the norm in countries around Europe.
But when the film discusses changes to soy production, it emphasizes not nostalgia for GMO free seed but other consequences of industrialized farming: fewer companies controlling distribution. According to one expert, few foods are GMO free, including animal feed and chocolate. All this food is not sent to countries that need it, so 100,000 die of starvation. One huge food company, Pioneer, is in 120 countries, including China, and their slogan is “We feed the world,” but, according to the spokesperson, the company has no heart and sells to the highest bidder rather than feeding a starving world. This food advocate asserts that 842 million people are malnourished, so “Any child who dies of starvation is murdered and reinforces numbers” he says.
The film shows soy manufacturing as especially problematic in other ways, as well. According to one expert, because they are fed on Brazilian soy, European livestock are, in a sense, eating up the rainforest of Amazonia, causing an ecological imbalance. In Brazil, an area the size of France plus Portugal has been cleared since 1975 while children starve in Somalia, Sudan, and rural Brazil, where women feed their children stone soup. In Northeastern Brazil, water is contaminated, and women can only feed their children goat’s milk once they have outgrown their mothers’ breasts. These rural Brazilians cannot read and write, and now they can grow little food; even though Brazil is one of the largest exporters of soy and one of the richest agrarian states, its people are starving. Europeans import 90% of soy for their livestock from Brazil, the expert explains, since European corn and soy are burned for electricity.
The film attempts to reveal some of the dangers of industrialized chicken and egg production, as well, but it ends with a portrait of Nestle’s CEO and his claim to feed the world. Avene Nestle, the company’s current CEO asserts that “Nature is no longer pitiless” and advocates for GMO food instead of organic, since it will more quickly and readily feed the hungry. Although Nestle explains that his responsibility is to ensure a profitable future for the company and its shareholders, his point about feeding a starving world seems like an answer to the starvation problem broached by the film. The film ends with this portrait, leaving the viewer with mixed reactions to the film’s images of industrialized food production. Instead of the single message and point of view of Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, We Feed the World relies on a series of experts to make its point about the social and environmental consequences of turning food production into a massive industry. Yet the film loses its edge when it ends not with a clear rearticulation of its thesis but with an opposite, contrasting, and conflicting message of a new kind of hope: the hope that with efficiency and high-production counts that include GMO seed and the end of food production as a family business, factory farming can feed the world.
As rhetorical and talking head documentary, We Feed the World provides abundant information about industrialized farming, this time from multiple expert perspectives, a point placed in a positive light by many reviewers. Its distributor, Bullfrog Films, asserts that the film “vividly reveals the dysfunctionality of the industrialized world food system and shows what world hunger has to do with us.” As Dalia Perelman, a nutrition professor from San Jose State University, explains, “the film effectively reveals the paradoxical disparity between the prevalence of hunger and the overproduction of food, sometimes within the same country.” The Lumiere Reader calls the film “visually striking,” even though “drawn out montages of agricultural production often slows the documentary’s pace to a crawl.” According to TheLumiere Reader review, the film “does…make its case convincingly—if somewhat bleakly,” but he also notes some problems with the film, suggesting that the documentary is a “series of talking head interviews” that “might occasionally feel like a sermon to the converted.”
For us, however, both the drawn-out montages and series of talking heads slow down the pace of We Feed the World. In fact, we assert that the interviews do more than slow down the film; they also counter the film’s point of view by attempting to take an evenhanded approach to a controversial issue—industrialized food production. We agree in part with Joe Leydon’s assertion in a Variety review: “We Feed the World is sincere but monotonous as it decries the excesses of globalized food industry,” so much so that “even sympathetic viewers may find themselves casting eager glances at their watches during the ponderous progression of talking-head interviews, statistic-crammed titles and globe-hopping reportage.” More importantly for us, however, the message the film is asserting is diluted by the multiple points of view the film foregrounds. The film’s attempt to provide an evenhanded overview of the food industry and its consequences veils the case the film seems to be making, a case that harks back to the pastoral paradise of a pre-industrial food production world.
Divided into sections introduced by titles, We Feed the World seems to draw on nostalgia as a rhetorical strategy, similar to the individual and communal nostalgia Al Gore employs in AnInconvenient Truth. The first segment introduces factory farming and its consequences by contrasting it with a farmer’s nostalgia for his father’s twelve hectares of land. Now it takes six times that to sustain his father’s standard of living, the farmer explains. That same strategy is in place when the film explores the consequences of turning the fishing industry into factory farming. According to Dominique, a fisherman in Brittany, the EU has turned farming of all types into an industry that is mechanized and scientifically controlled. Dominique laments the EU’s requirement that he replace his more natural approach with the EU’s dictates. He observes nature and notices how it follows the sun, from foxes to fish in the sea, Dominique explains. Nets must be cast at the same time, “like nature herself.” He counts the number of waves in the sea to determine the right sea height. By observing, he decides when and where to fish. It is still dark, but he and his crew prepare the nets at sea and record their catch in the EU logbook. Investors and financiers have made fishing an industry, he says. The EU brings in scientists to steal the fishermen’s knowledge, Dominique believes. They keep track of what they catch and what they earn. According to Dominique, the sea is divided into zones, and the EU allows certain amounts of fishing and profits from each. All is controlled.
That control is amplified when the fish make it to shore. First an inspector makes sure all the fish are fresh when they return. According to the inspector, some of the fish are too fresh and need aging; some are of good quality; others do not meet standards. He shows the difference between a small boat’s catches and those of an industrial boat’s who go so deep the fish’s eyes pop when brought to the surface. Industrial fish, he says, have no flavor—“Ratfish only for selling, not for eating.” Commercial fishing is moving toward complete industrialization, even though small ship’s catches are so much better, the inspector asserts. The EU’s rules are making it too difficult for smaller fishermen. This inspector declares that Dominique and the small boats could save the fish and conserve better than industrial fishermen, who are only out for a profit without considering nature’s flow and food quality, but the EU disagrees, supporting "controlled" industrial fishing decimating the oceans and fish over conservation.
