Reading film

“We have allowed ourselves to become so disconnected and ignorant about something that is as intimate as the food that we eat.” –Joel Salatin

Watching Salatin sitting in the grass with his pig, wearing a pair of mud-stained jean suspenders is quite a contrast to Carole Morison’s chicken house, which she admits is more like mass production than farming. We’ve already discussed in class the idea of knowing exactly where our food is coming from, and we’ve read powerful descriptions from Bourdain and Pollan about the impact of staring our food in the eye before it makes its way into our stomachs. There is, however, something different about seeing it on film and having live images of Polyface farms to supplement our understanding of it from The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Characters like Salatin seem more real when we have visuals.

It takes a great descriptive writer to use his or her words to compete with the image of a sobbing mother advocating for Kevin’s Law and condemning the USDA for being unable to exercise more power in the matter of her son’s death by meat contamination. We talk about unfair working conditions and how the industry’s laborers earn barely enough to sustain their families; the film gave us the opportunity to see an example of where a migrant worker lives, and to watch the police track down illegal immigrants, arrest them, and let the companies who hired them go free and continue making billions.

On Monday I attended the second annual Valentine’s Day Dinner in Hicks Banquet Hall. Like last year, a note card with a discussion question awaited guests at their seats. Unlike last year, Farms to K teamed up with MiRA (Migrant Rights Action), the Kalamazoo service-learning program that works closely with Farmworker Legal Services. Due to the collaboration, the dinner didn’t focus solely on the importance of eating locally, but also on the migrant worker experience. My note card, for example, asked if we as consumers worry about how pesticides in our food affect the workers; the answer read something like, “We worry about pesticides in our food…”—but what about the workers? Some interesting discussions emerged from the dinner that night.

On a different note: I tend to consider reading a book a more intimate experience than watching a film (because people almost always say the book is better than the movie), but “Food, Inc.” changed my perception of the intimacy of documentary films. This whole movie highlighted the helplessness of farmers, farm workers, and consumers. Until I watched the film, I never gave much thought to the illusion of diversity in a supermarket, or the marriage between science and technology and McDonald’s burgers. Or how farmers are so helplessly in debt that they would compromise their morals to keep their contracts. They have families to support, too.

So who is more protected: the industry or the consumer? Would farmers like Moe Parr win their cases in seed saving if they aren’t forced to settle with powerful companies because they can’t pay the legal fees? Why does the government subsidize fast food and not healthy food? What about looking at this issue from the standpoint of our health? And is obesity truly a crisis of personal responsibility? I wonder how much we should really allow the government and the food industry to step in and control the way we eat.