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A SCEPTIC EVALUATES "FOOD, INC"

"Food, Inc" seemed like it was going to be a punitive film. I expected a lecture set against horrific images that promised to make my next burger slightly less tasty. It was the kind of film that appeared destined to be seen by a sympathetic audience, who would then go on to zealously recommend it to indifferent acquaintances.

I was wrong. For one thing, it is visually glorious, full of sweeping pans of farmland, shifting dunes of corn kernels and happily roaming hogs. Early footage of hamburger-serving carhops on roller-skates mix with hypnotic views of modern supermarkets (which, we learn, contain an average 47,000 products on their shelves). There are also clips culled from hidden cameras in factories (or on willing factory workers), and segments that capture both the beauty of American farmland and the cost at which these farms are run.

The information "Food, Inc" delivers is heady. It reveals the grim, insidious consequences of agribusiness: just what happens when multinational corporations take control of food production. The results are often sadistic for animals and shockingly unhealthy for consumers. This case is well served by Robert Kenner's even-handed filmmaking. He lets much of the images speak for themselves, such as his footage of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, a Hobbesian nightmare that manages to bring out the worst in both animals (tainted food) and people (hidden cameras show farm workers kicking animals). A more dogmatic and theatrical tone from the likes of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock would have overwhelmed this otherwise poignant film about what we buy and eat.

Anyone who has come across the work of Eric Schlosser or Michael Pollan (two of the film's primary voices) will find a familiar message here: big agricultural businesses influence food policy in America, ensuring that corn production is subsidised (and therefore fed to animals, who often get sick from it, and is in everything we eat) and that the federal Food and Drug Administration is more or less powerless to protect us.

But there's an emotional and intellectual difference in seeing these facts unfold on a screen, rather than just reading them on a page. Demystification becomes a matter of stifling nausea. After our tour of the slaughterhouses of the meat industry, we are subjected to a lingering shot of a package of bacon in a supermarket. Somehow that bacon is scarier than a summer's worth of horror films.

"Food, Inc", in theatres now.

~ MOLLY YOUNG