Food, Inc.

"You'll never look at dinner the same way again."


Since they don't allow the trailer to be embedded in blogs, you'll have to go to youtube to see it. In the meantime, here's a screenshot I snagged from The Bovine.

With a constituency limited to anyone who eats, "Food, Inc." is a civilized horror movie for the socially conscious, the nutritionally curious and the hungry. Yes, it has a deceptively cheery palette, but helmer Robert Kenner's doc -- which 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 manipulation of both genetics and the law. Doc biz may be in the doldrums, but "Food, Inc." is so aesthetically polished and politically urgent, theatrical play seems a no-brainer, though it won't do much for popcorn sales.

[snip]

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Opens June 12, 2009

Big Ag's Latest Scam

From Op-Ed News:

The "food safety" bills in Congress were written by Monsanto, Cargill, Tysons, ADM, etc. All are associated with the opposite of food safety. What is this all about then?

In the simplest terms, organic food and a rebirth of farming were winning. Not in absolute numbers but in a deep and growing shift by the public toward understanding the connection between their food and their health, between good food and true social pleasures, between their own involvement in food and the improvement in their lives in general, between local food and a burgeoning local economy.

Slow Food was right - limit your food to what comes from your region and from real farmers, and slow down to cook it and linger over it with friends and family, and the world begins to change for the better.

In the same vein, if you're a seed saver, you might want to read this.

On Re-localization, or Why we're doing this....

There's a direct line between my interest in political ideas and the vegetables on my roof.

Stan Goff has given me more to think about:

Re-localization is not utopianism. It is an initiative — being tried on many fronts and in many ways — to re-design the built environment whenever and wherever possible into something that is more sustainable and more accountable than what we have now (which, btw, is failing very badly and threatening us with a dramatic centralization of authority when the level of suburban anxiety reaches a certain tipping point). This initiative consists of model projects and experiments, or local networks dealing with political issues (there is a policy struggle in Durham right now about whether people may raise laying hens inside the city limits), to regional and inter-regional communications networks who share information and occasionally share work.

After reading far too many wonderful proposals about "What Should Be Done"--made by people who don't have the power, or intent, to act on them--my hope for this year is that we'll be hearing more from people who are Doing Things for themselves.

Bountiful Backyards is one of those stories.