Charlie and the Obesity Factory

[June 17th, 2009]

It has been eight years since Eric Schlosser wrote Fast Food Nation, and three years since Michael Pollan released The Omnivore’s Dilemma. That’s 4.4 billion Big Macs and 2.1 billion Whoppers, respectively. By now, Schlosser and Pollan must feel like voices crying in the wilderness that, hey, there are some delicious vegetables growing in this wilderness—while on the other side of the Jordan, the villagers laugh through mouthfuls of KFC Famous Bowls. Who will save America from its morbid snacking? Filmmakers! Morgan Spurlock regurgitated his all-beef patties and special sauce in Super Size Me, Richard Linklater cast Kris Kristofferson as a wise rancher in the dramatic adaptation of Fast Food Nation—and McDonald’s added some apple slices to its Happy Meals. The industrial food system did not crumble, but an example was set: This spring alone saw the Portland premieres of Good Food and Food Fight, which I am told are entirely separate documentaries.

Undaunted, Schlosser and Pollan have advised the production of another reformist doc, Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. Their stomach-turning confection strikes me as far more successful than most of the previous courses. Much of its efficacy stems from Kenner’s use of scope. You may scoff that the problem eating of this prosperous country doesn’t amount to a hill of beans—but wait until you see the actual hill of beans, the mountain ranges of shucked corn, the writhing abattoirs of chickens, the cattle mired in offal inside “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.” (Note to the beef industry: When your business is battling PETA for public sympathy, giving your stockyards a name that evokes concentration camps shows a certain recklessness with words.) Jesus, those chickens. Forget Jimmy Dean sausage; it’s the Dolly Parton poultry we need to be worried about, with their genetically modified breasts so hypertrophied that the birds can’t walk, and eventually collapse into their own shit, where they die. The practices used by Tyson and Perdue are so horrifying (and so demeaning to Carole Morison, a contracted farmer forced to pick up the carcasses) that when Pollan’s organic buddy Joel Salatin shows up later in the movie to slit a few hens’ throats, the human touch feels like a breath of fresh air.

Food, Inc. wants to be placed in the tradition of The Jungle, but while Upton Sinclair complained that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” the movie achieves the opposite effect. None of the movie’s shocks has as much of an impact as the story of Barbara Kowalcyk, who has been trying to increase the FDA’s reach ever since her 2-year-old son died from a contaminated hamburger. Lobbying to shut down meat processors that repeatedly plop E. coli in the patties, she can’t even say what companies’ products she stopped purchasing after her bereavement—that would violate the “veggie libel laws,” statutes allowing agribusinesses to sue for defamation of their products. (Hey, has Monsanto’s patented soybean stopped beating its wife?)

Enraging as Food, Inc. may be, however, it remains an example of the very divide in American eating it seeks to bridge. The movie opened last weekend to heavy press coverage—on exactly three screens nationwide. This week it expands to Portland, a city where the locavore’s dilemma is whether it is more righteous to shop at a smaller organic grocery than a larger one. This is not the movie’s fault, but it does make the final appeals to shop at farmers markets ring a touch hollow. Kenner only glancingly addresses whether mass-produced food can ever be altered from the inside (is a Gardenburger by a corporately owned name still a Gardenburger?), and even if his film somehow manages to reach the masses, I suspect it would leave most feeling fat and defeated. It’s very nice that Joel Satalin talks to his pigs and chickens—the farmer looks like Will Ferrell, and acts like Mark Wahlberg—but is a bird in the hand worth a billion in the supermarkets?