This past weekend I watched Food Inc. But before I talk about the film specifically I want to consider a couple other things.
The Templeton Foundation is sponsoring a “Big Questions” series. Each question features responses from an assortment of academics and public intellectuals. One question in the series asks, “Does the free market corrode moral character?” One of the respondents, Michael Walzer, says, “Competition in the market puts people under great pressure to break the ordinary rules of decent conduct and then to produce good reasons for doing so. It is these rationalizations — the endless self-deception necessary to meet the bottom line and still feel okay about it — that corrode moral character.”
These rationalizations for doing egregious things, especially in relation to nonhuman animals, have obviously been long decried by animal rights/welfarists of various stripes. Peter Singer’s 1975 book, Animal Liberation, brought to the public eye most of these practices. (In 2006, Singer, along with Jim Mason, wrote another book, The Way We Eat, which focused specifically on the American diet. They highlighted, among other things, three diets: “standard American diet,” “ethical omnivores,” and vegans. The book also represented a refutation to some of the claims advanced by Michael Pollan and others. ) And, since their founding in 1980, PETA have continued highlighting everyday animal cruelty.
But, to the public eye, Peter Singer and PETA are “radical” forces. The things they want us to do, like giving up meat and dairy, which, even in the face of the facts they present about factory farming, environment damage, and health effects, aren’t accepted by most as live options. So, how do we tie together evidence about American obesity, factory farming, the environment, etc.? Food Inc., in a way, makes such an attempt.
The film features Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. The film looks at, among other things, the new face of American farming, and factory farming specifically, an American family’s diet and its effects on their health, and some possible solutions to the problem. If you’ve read Schlosser’s and/or Pollan’s books then what the film visits isn’t new material. The same can be said about the factory farm footage (Earthlings, another documentary film which came out a few years ago, depicts them much more graphically), and the family of four eating their meals from a fast food joint. But there’s something to be said about tying all these things together in one place with public figures and in the manner in which the filmmakers did. The movie didn’t reinvent the wheel or, for that matter, tread new ground. But it’s another (successful) attempt at showing how commodifying life affects everyone. If Food Inc. isn’t a wake-up call then I don’t know what is.
