What is the real story behind the colourful packaging, and the shrink-wrapped poultry, meat and fish? Do we really have as much choice as we think?
According to Food Inc, Robert Kenner’s hit US documentary about the American industrialised food complex and its impact on health, the environment and workers’ rights, and the potentially dangerous links between government and big business, we should be very wary of taking our food at face value.
“Yes, we’re eating for less than in any other time in history,” Kenner says, “but there are hidden costs to this low-cost food.” And Big Food is determined to make sure they stay hidden, says the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser in the film. Because if people knew where their food was really coming from, “you wouldn’t want to eat it”.
Sitting in a London office, the two men recall how they started talking in 2002 about making a documentary based on Fast Food Nation, Schlosser’s best-selling exposé of how the fast food industry revolutionised the way food is produced and its wide-ranging effects.
Two years later, while Kenner was still working out how to do it, Morgan Spurlock’s gonzo documentary Super Size Me appeared. As funny as it was stomach-churning, the film followed Spurlock as he ate only McDonald’s food for a month. Unsurprisingly, the results weren’t pretty. People thought the film was about Fast Food Nation, Kenner says, but “it was a one-note version about the evils of fast food, and I don’t think Eric’s book was about that”. He felt that Spurlock’s approach needed to be “re-adjusted on some level”.
Moreover, it had become apparent to Kenner that because of the way food was being produced, “all food (in supermarkets) had become fast food”. Clearly, he needed to talk to the major players in agribusiness -- Tyson, Smithfield, Perdue, Monsanto, etc -- about how this food comes to our plate.
Some hope. Instead of assisting the film-maker, corporations stonewalled him. This was a new experience for the Emmy-winning director, who once had a film screened at the White House for President Clinton and Vice-President Gore.
“I was naïve because I’ve had so much more co-operation in any other film I have ever done than this one.” People were friendly enough, he says. They would invite him out for dinners -- “which felt slightly like a violation but I accepted” -- but, ultimately, did not want to participate. “I think I could have had greater access to nuclear terrorists than I would have to seeing how our food is produced.”
Monsanto, whose genetically modified soya bean accounts for 90% of the US soya bean market, has claimed that it never actually told the director “no”. However, Kenner takes a different view.
“Basically, we had 25 phone calls, we had about 12 emails, back and forth; we gave them information of who was in the film, we told them what they were talking about, and sent them a note at a certain point saying, ‘We will take your lack of response as a no.’ They didn’t respond but then they said they never declined. But I would say, at the request of my lawyer, that’s a misleading statement -- I would actually use another word.”
His circumspection is understandable given the willingness of Big Food business in America to sue people who talk negatively about their products. In the documentary, a woman whose son died from eating beef contaminated with the deadly E. coli 0157H7 bacteria, refuses even to tell Kenner how the tragedy has affected her eating habits. “I was so taken off-guard I didn’t know what to say,” he gasps.
Kenner was also shocked when he attended a hearing on whether cloned meat should be labelled, and an industry representative declared: “I don’t think it is in the consumer’s interest to label this product. It would be too confusing for them.”
“I got goose bumps,” Kenner says, “and I realised something is really terrifyingly wrong. In a free market we’re not supposed to be able to have the information to decide what to buy? It was at that point we started thinking, ‘Maybe this is a film about more than food’.”
Food Inc. exposes Big Food’s use of fear and obfuscation to keep the facts from consumers, and effectively provides the transparency that the corporations won’t. It shows us the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of chickens are raised in America and reveals how the farmers are practically made “slaves” by the companies to which they are contracted.
“My line of the day is ‘Coming to a supermarket near you’,” Kenner says, “because you’re going to be flooded with this stuff. People love cheap food, as they should. But, unfortunately, it’s not cheap. And we’re just starting to understand that. They spend billions of dollars that separate us from thinking about this food, because it’s been very profitable.”
Kenner and Schlosser insist they’re not anti-corporation. In fact Food Inc. shows how mega-corps like Wal-Mart could potentially be part of the solution. The problem is the size and muscle of companies. In America today, the top four beef packers control more than 80% of the market, Schlosser says, essentially undermining the concept of consumer choice.
“And it’s not just in agriculture; it’s also in the media, it’s also in finance ... The great irony is that during the age that worships the free market, one market after another has become un-free. And it’s part of this doublespeak, disinformation, throughout all of this. It’s a way of disguising the changes and disguising where real power lies.”
Food Inc. reveals that Big Food has been effectively running US food and farming policy thanks, partly, to the appointment of corporate lobbyists to top positions in the food regulatory agencies under Bush (who ate organic in the White House), while Monsanto also had close ties with the Clinton administration. The result, the film says, is that the interests of agribusiness have superseded the rights of consumers, with sometimes devastating and tragic consequences.
Some viewers might breathe a sigh of relief that they’re not living in America after watching Food Inc., but it’s not that simple, argues Schlosser. “If you look at how the BSE crisis unfolded from the first day till the last, you saw the Ministry of Agriculture here acting on behalf of the beef industry, not on behalf of the people of Great Britain.”
Who, indeed, could forget the then Agriculture Minister John Gummer feeding his young daughter a hamburger on TV to quell fears about British beef? “So it would be nice to say that the film is just about how f***** up America is. But, unfortunately, these companies are global and these problems are really global.”
We should not be too gloomy, though. As Kenner points out, growing awareness of the risks attached to smoking influenced the way that the tobacco industry operates, and the same can be done with the food giants. “You vote three times a day: become conscious of what you are eating, and you can help change the system.”
Food Inc. is released on Friday and has been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Documentary.
