Food, Inc (2008)
River Road Entertainment, Participant Media

Description

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of e coli--the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.
Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield Farm'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.

Tags

Food, Farming

Collected reviews and ratings

9.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Amy Biancolli

I was warned not to eat before seeing "Food, Inc.," a mind-boggling, heart-rending, stomach-churning expose on the food industry. Unfortunately, no one told me I might never want to ingest anything ever again.
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8.8 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

This review doesn't read one thing like a movie review. But most of the stuff I discuss in it, I learned from the new documentary "Food, Inc.," directed by Robert Kenner and based on the recent book An Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I figured it wasn't important for me to go into detail about the photography and the editing. I just wanted to scare the bejesus out of you, which is what "Food, Inc." did to me.
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8.8 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

Eating can be one dangerous business. Don't take another bite till you see Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., an essential, indelible documentary that is scarier than anything in the last five Saw horror shows.
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8.0 Exclaim! | Erin Oke

From the chicken farmer cut off from the company for insisting on windows in her barns to the mother fighting for stricter food inspections after losing a child to E-Coli to the farmer being sued by Monsanto for growing non-GMO crops, the film highlights many David versus Goliath-type stories.
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8.0 Variety

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.
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7.0 DVD Talk | Brian Orndorf

Food. What was once an abundant, cherished source of nutrition and spirit has been turned into a cold, destructive big business by those looking to profit wildly by exploiting a necessity. The ambitious documentary "Food, Inc." seeks to cover the wide range of food ills and agrarian perversions, hopeful to showcase a growing corporate movement that's removed the purity of consumption to turn a fast buck, using abusive attitudes, fallible safety precautions, and unhealthy ingredients to keep the food flowing.
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7.0 New York Times | Manohla Dargis

Forget buckets of blood. Nothing says horror like one of those tubs of artificially buttered, nonorganic popcorn at the concession stand. That, at least, is one of the unappetizing lessons to draw from one of the scariest movies of the year, “Food, Inc.,” an informative, often infuriating activist documentary about the big business of feeding or, more to the political point, force-feeding, Americans all the junk that multinational corporate money can buy. You’ll shudder, shake and just possibly lose your genetically modified lunch.
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7.0 Eye For Film

In Food, Inc., director Robert Kenner, ably assisted by authors Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), dismantles our food chain to reveal government-backed greed, disease, subterfuge and cruelty. Suddenly that concession-stand popcorn doesn’t look quite so appetizing.
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5.0 filmcritic.com | Chris Cabin

A suitably informative cinematic primer for a subject that has been chronicled best (and extensively) in print, Food, Inc. nevertheless has too much on its plate (pun intended). For whatever information it does give during its runtime, there are several questions still left lingering, especially concerning corporate motives.
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