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The key to media's hidden codes - Ben Beaton

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Directed by Robert Kenner. With Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Richard Lobb, Vince Edwards. An unflattering look inside America's corporate controlled food industry.

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Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you about the issues the film Food, Inc. raised regarding Monsanto.

We believe documentaries can play an important role in drawing attention to vital issues. When it comes to Monsanto, nothing is more important to us than agriculture - it's our whole business. It also happens to be the topic the Food, Inc. documentary covers. The film addressed agriculture very broadly, but our role in the industry is specifically focused on seeds, crop protection, and software to help farmers around the world produce crops while making the most efficient use of energy, water, and soil.

There are several topics raised in the film that we would agree are very important, especially when it comes to food safety and the importance of understanding where your food comes from. However, many of the topics and claims made in regard to Monsanto were incorrect or misleading. This isn't very surprising; in the past we haven't always done a great job talking about our business, products, or technology. We spent most of our time talking with farmers because they are our customers and, unfortunately, we overlooked the importance of talking to society. We found out the hard way that when we don't tell our own story others will do it for us. That's why we want to make an effort to better address your questions and concerns raised by the Food, Inc documentary now.

Below you'll find the most commonly asked questions raised by the film. If you don't find your question please visit the Conversation where you can view hundreds of questions from consumers answered by experts. You're also welcome to ask a new question of your own.

Are GMO foods safe?

Foods derived from GMOs have a thoroughly tested, proven safety record. Countless studies have reviewed the safety of GMOs, and trusted organizations such as the American Medical Association and World Health Organization have agreed on the long-term safety of food grown from GMOs. We feed our own families with foods grown from our crops and safety is something we care deeply about. Here is a recent Forbes article that highlights the safety of GM products and here is an extensive list of studies confirming the safety of GMOs.

Why does Monsanto sue farmers when Monsanto seed blows into their fields?

We don't sue farmers who have accidentally ended up with trace amounts of our seeds in their fields, and we've made a commitment that we never will. You can check out this NPR article for more information about how this idea might have gotten started.

Why does Monsanto require annual seed purchases for farmers when the typical practice was saving some from the previous crop and using them?

When farmers choose to purchase the seeds we produce, they agree by contract not to save those seeds at the end of the season. We have these formal agreements because many of the seed varieties we develop are patented. Through the continuous innovative cycle fueled in part by patents, we are able to continue our work developing the next generation of products to be used by farmers to ensure they can feed the world's growing population.

Additionally, buying new seeds every year often results in a much higher-quality crop than replanting seeds from a previous year because of the way we produce and manage our seeds. Additionally, hybrid seeds are less effective when replanted because they might not result in crops that have the same traits as the first generation, such as pest resistance. Check out this video put together by graduate students at the University of California - Davis which explains the science behind this in more detail.

Why do you say you work with the government when in fact many regulatory officials are former Monsanto employees? How is that fair?

We believe all government employees, including former Monsanto personnel, must ultimately serve the best interests of U.S. taxpayers. Individuals throughout the private sector, not just from Monsanto, routinely serve in government roles. A handful of former Monsanto employees have moved on to work for the U.S. government, and we did have a former employee, Michael Taylor, who went on to serve as deputy commissioner of the FDA. If you're interested, Cathleen Enright, who served on President Obama's Agricultural Policy Committee in 2008 and 2012, wrote a good post about this topic.

Why did you sue a small farmer for cleaning seeds? What happened in the case of Moe Parr?

Even though farmers are free to clean, save and replant their own conventional seeds, most of them buy new seeds every year for one of two reasons:

They decide to take advantage of the benefits of new hybrid seeds; or

They choose the benefits of biotech seeds and have signed an agreement that they will not save, sell, or replant the seeds produced from the biotech seeds they bought from their chosen seed vendor.

Maurice (Moe) Parr is not a farmer. He has operated a seed cleaning business in Indiana for decades. We became aware he was involved in the illegal cleaning of patented seed and, after years of efforts to manage the problem in other ways, we were forced to take legal action. He is able to continue to clean conventional soybeans, wheat, and other non-patented seed crops. Monsanto, in a gesture of good faith, agreed to forego the financial judgment against Mr. Parr as long as he honors the terms of the court order.

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Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you about the issues the film Food, Inc. raised regarding Monsanto. We believe documentaries can play an important role in drawing attention to vital issues. When it comes to Monsanto, nothing is more important to us than agriculture - it's our whole business.

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In a world dominated by corporations, it is no surprise that the American food system has been hijacked by the relentless drive for profit. Under the pretexts of affordability and convenience, modern industrialized agriculture has consistently ignored the unintended consequences of their "efficient" practices on our health and livelihoods, the environment and other species.

Equally implicated is the United States government, which simultaneously subsidizes and fails to adequately regulate the agriculture industrial complex. This reality, explored by Frederick Wiseman in his 1976 cinema vérité documentary Meat and more recently by Nikolaus Geyrhalter in the unnarrated montage film Unser täglich Brot ( Our Daily Bread; 2005), is more explicitly tackled in Robert Kenner's , which opens June 12 in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and nationwide on June 19.

The issue of food and the many ways in which it affects our lives is an enormous one, and the film is a broad undertaking, exploring everything from the health impacts of ever ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup (one out of three Americans born today is expected to develop early-onset diabetes), to water and air pollution caused by intensive factory farming, to human rights violations perpetrated against undocumented workers by mega corporations like Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. Viewers are aided in processing all of this information by motion graphics created by Big Star NYC, which worked with Kenner to create an entertaining and helpful visual language for the film.

Ultimately, Food, Inc. is an examination of free market capitalism's disregard for anything other than the bottom line. "This is a film that's about more than food," says Kenner. "It's really about corporate consolidation and irresponsibility and about the relationship of these companies with government. It's not that different from what happened with the financial crisis. These companies have been totally irresponsible and at the end of the day, we're the ones who pay the price."

Robert Kenner, director/producer of Food, Inc. (Prod.: Elise Pearlstein; Co-Prods.: Eric Schlosser, Richard Pearce, Melissa Robledo)

Throughout his career, Kenner has made films that strive to expose truths about American society, including the Peabody Award-winning Two Days in October (2005), about the polarizing effect of the Vietnam War, and War Letter s (2001), which brings to life correspondence between soldiers and loved ones from the Revolutionary War to the First Gulf War.

Despite experience with controversial subject matter, however, Kenner didn't realize what he was getting into when he turned his lens towards the food industry. "This is a much more frightening subject than I ever imagined, a much more litigious subject," Kenner maintains. Throughout the making of the film, he and his crew were denied interviews by agribusiness, and they encountered numerous people who were afraid to talk for fear of being sued. "I think you could be making a film about nuclear terrorism and have easier access. These people have a lot of
clout and they use lawyers very freely to intimidate. I spent more on legal fees for this film than all my past 15 films combined."

Inspired by investigative journalist Eric Schlosser's best-selling Fast Food Nati on (2001), Kenner felt compelled to explore the question, Where does our food come from? Schlosser, who is featured in interviews throughout the documentary along with fellow food author Michael Pollan, co-produced the film, which is presented by Participant Media, River Road Entertainment and Magnolia Pictures.

Author Michael Pollan ( The Omnivore's Dilemma),featured in Robert Kenner's Food, Inc.(Prod.: Elise Pearlstein; Co-Prods.: Eric Schlosser, Richard Pearce, Melissa Robledo).

Participant is also taking the lead on the film's outreach campaign. An issue-focused production company complete with its own "Social Action" department, its goals are to reform food policies and empower individuals to influence corporations through their consumer choices. Participant has been involved with documentaries like Davis Guggenheim's global warming screed, An Inconvenient Truth, as well as hard-hitting narrative features like George Clooney's Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck.

"For Participant, the outreach program is just as important as the film," Kenner explains. "They want change to happen." Through strategic partnerships with nonprofits and
corporations, Participant is working to get the film into diverse communities as well as organizing screenings for policy gatekeepers. They recently brought Food, Inc. to Washington, DC,
where the film was shown to some very high level administrators including Congress and cabinet members, as well as figures at major regulatory agencies.

Participant is also trying to engage the general public on TakePart.com, where people inspired by the film can go to learn more about food issues and
support legislation to get junk food out of schools and require restaurants to list the calorie content of menu items. While Food, Inc. portrays a vast interconnected system that is largely
not looking out for our individual interests, the film and its complementary outreach campaign make a strong case for citizen action, reminding us that we "vote" on our food system three times a day--breakfast, lunch and dinner.

It is Kenner's belief that as people learn about what's really happening with food, they will demand better choices. "There's going to be a revolution, but it's going to be led by mothers who don't want to feed this food to their children," he asserts. But while the film drops some references to farmer's markets and urban gardening, it also makes a strong pragmatic case for engaging corporate giants like Wal-Mart, which are beginning to include more organic food in their stores in response to consumer demand.

From Robert Kenner's Food, Inc. (Prod.: Elise Pearlstein; Co-Prods.: Eric Schlosser, Richard Pearce, Melissa Robledo).

And while Kenner acknowledges that "it would be much better for the planet if we started
eating less meat," Food, Inc. steers clear of animal liberation arguments while pushing for a return to grass-fed, hormone-free meat production. One argument that Kenner rejects is that it's elitist to think we can feed people healthy, organic food. "What's elitist is to think we
can subsidize food that's making people sick and think that poor people should be eating that," he counters.

Hopefully Food, Inc. will join the ranks of Super Size Me and succeed in both
entertaining audiences and spurring them to investigate where their food comes from and demand a food system that is healthy and just for all.

Shira Golding is a filmmaker and food lover who strives to eat locally, sustainably and cruelty-free. She curated Arts Engine's Media That Matters: Good Food, a collection of short films on food justice that has been distributed to educators and activists around the country. Check out her work at www.shirari.com.

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Change: It's What's for Dinner: 'Food, Inc.' Takes on Agribusiness

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In a world dominated by corporations, it is no surprise that the American food system has been hijacked by the relentless drive for profit. Under the pretexts of affordability and convenience, modern industrialized agriculture has consistently ignored the unintended consequences of their "efficient" practices on our health and livelihoods, the environment and other species.

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MOVIES about food used to make you want to eat.

The decade that spanned the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was particularly fruitful. It took heroic resolve to walk out of the Japanese spaghetti western "Tampopo" and not head directly to a ramen bar.

Cooks spent entire months trying to recreate "Babette's Feast" and dreamed of rolling out pasta with Stanley Tucci in "Big Night."

By the time Ang Lee's "Eat Drink Man Woman" came out in 1994, moviegoers had come to expect food films filled with glistening dumplings, magical dessert and technically perfect kitchen scenes.

But that was then, before Wal-Mart started selling organic food and Michelle Obama planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. Before E. coli was a constant in the food supply, before politicians tried to tax soda and before anyone gave much thought to the living conditions of chickens.

Into this world comes "Food, Inc.," a documentary on the state of the nation's food system that opens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on Friday.

"Food, Inc." is part of a new generation of food films that drip with politics, not sauces. It's eat-your-peas cinema that could make viewers not want to eat anything at all.

"All we have are these little canisters of film, and we're launching them at a fortress," said Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a filmmaker and farmer who is finishing a documentary on the young agrarian movement called "The Greenhorns."

In 2004 Morgan Spurlock took a mini- Michael Moore approach with "Super Size Me," a documentary that showed what happens when a man eats nothing but fast food for a month. (His waistline ends up looking a little more like Mr. Moore's, and his sex life takes a dive.)

There has even been a feature film. In 2006 the nonfiction book "Fast Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser became a narrative (starring Greg Kinnear) about the restaurant industry, obesity and meat-packing labor exploitation.

Mr. Schlosser is a producer of, and a character in, "Food, Inc.," in which the director Robert Kenner takes a sprawling look at the perils of Big Food. The film is being promoted as an exposé of "the highly mechanized underbelly" of the seemingly benign food people eat every day.

"Food, Inc." begins with images of a bright, bulging American supermarket, and then moves to the jammed chicken houses, grim meat-cutting rooms and chemical-laced cornfields where much of the American diet comes from. Along the way Mr. Kenner attempts to expose the hidden costs of a system in which fast-food hamburgers cost $1 and soda is cheaper than milk.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than the previous 10,000," Michael Pollan says as the film opens. Mr. Pollan, an author and occasional contributor to The New York Times Magazine, is the spiritual guide for the film and serves as its narrator. "A lot of it is hard to watch," he conceded, "but I think people are ready to take a good, unflinching look at how their food is produced."

Mr. Kenner, who has previously tackled subjects like war and endangered species in a series of television documentaries, didn't know much about food when he embarked on "Food, Inc." about six years ago. But after warnings from lawyers, stonewalling from food companies and months on the ground in farm fields, grocery stores and Congressional offices, he became a hard-core campaigner for better food.

"It's almost like a horror film, like 'Invasion of the Food Snatchers,' " Mr. Kenner said.

Much of the film takes direct aim at the usual suspects — big meat packing companies, Monsanto, the federal Agriculture Department. But Mr. Kenner also offers a sympathetic study of people whose lives have been hurt both from producing food on such a mass scale and eating the results.

"I think what's important here was connecting all these little pieces," he said. "Individually they didn't seem so insidious."

In a section that shows how modern, mass-produced chickens have been bred to grow to market size in half the time, a woman under contract with Perdue speaks out about the physical toll such rapid growth takes on the chickens and the stifling conditions in which they live.

She also explains the financial stranglehold large chicken companies have on growers. She ends up losing her contract because she refuses to enclose her chicken houses completely.

Viewers who haven't thought much about how all that food in the grocery store got to be there will likely find it hard to toss a few packages of pork chops and some Froot Loops in the cart and call it a day. Some viewers will undoubtedly look away during the meat cutting and processing scenes. For parents the eye-averting moment will come during repeated slow-motion scenes of a 2-year-old's last vacation. His mother, now a food-safety advocate, explains in a tearful voice-over the gruesome details of his death after he ate hamburger tainted with E. coli.

For people steeped in food politics the most revealing scenes are the least graphic. Monsanto goes after an elderly man whose life has been devoted to the practice of cleaning seeds so farmers can replant crops. The chemical company, which has patented herbicide-resistant soybeans and corn, says he is helping farmers plant Monsanto seeds illegally.

The man is forced in a deposition to expose longtime friends and clients who are suspected of using the seeds illegally. He eventually gives up the legal fight when he runs out of money. Monsanto recently posted a Web page ( monsanto.com/foodinc) devoted to countering the film's version of events.

Mr. Kenner also visits a poor family with a diabetic father. During their trip to a grocery store it's easy to see why they pass on broccoli in favor of fast-food hamburgers, which fill bellies longer and cheaper.

"Food, Inc." has the endorsement of all kinds of people in what some call "the good food movement." Alice Waters is a champion, and so is Martha Stewart. She has been arranging screenings for her staff and tweeting about the film: "See the film then tell me organic is too expensive for you and your family. It is so upsetting that good food is hard to find."

A screening that Mr. Pollan described as uncomfortable was even arranged for Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

Much of the buzz has been ginned up by an impressive full-court media campaign, which is spinning the movie as hard as a food company promoting a new product.

To coincide with the opening the lids of millions of containers of Stonyfield Farm yogurt have been turned into "Food, Inc." ads, thanks in large part to the company's chairman, Gary Hirshberg. One segment of the film is dedicated to his efforts to produce organic food on a mass scale.

The documentary even has its own companion book, which is more than 300 pages long and filled with essays about global warming, hunger and pesticides along with tips on how to talk to a farmer and improve school lunch.

Because "Food, Inc." was produced by Participant Media (among others), the company that backed "An Inconvenient Truth," comparisons are inevitable. But there's a big difference. After watching Al Gore explain the horrors of climate change, moviegoers can turn off a few lights, think about a Prius and call it a day. People who leave "Food, Inc." still have to eat.

And the filmmakers know that. At the end of the film a series of suggestions run across the screen. Plant a garden. Cook a meal for the family. Contact Congress.

"I want people to feel like they can do something," said Naomi Starkman, a Northern California media consultant and aspiring farmer who helped create the messages. "You make a choice three times a day on what you want to eat. That is power."

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Film - Robert Kenner's 'Food, Inc.' - The Perils of Mass-Producing What People Eat - NYTimes.com

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MOVIES about food used to make you want to eat. The decade that spanned the mid-1980s to mid-1990s was particularly fruitful. It took heroic resolve to walk out of the Japanese spaghetti western "Tampopo" and not head directly to a ramen bar.

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THIS is an important film. It's a warning. Don't follow the US down the path of food self-regulation. It leads to a nightmarish dystopia where children are killed by burgers, where the raising of animals under appalling conditions happens behind closed doors and where illegal immigrants are poorly paid to mistreat animals under conditions almost as inhumane to them.

It's a nation where if you try to tell the world about the dirty, dirty ways of the big food companies that control US food production, they will silence you with a phalanx of lawyers. In one state you can be jailed.

This 94-minute film, at its core, is a visualisation of two groundbreaking books: Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. Both appear in the film along with farmers including Joel Salatin with Schlosser as co-executive producer.

This polished shockumentary graphically and disturbingly reveals the unintended consequences of the concentration of food production to just a handful of massive companies, with processed genetically modified corn and soy as the basis of the national diet.

Shame, rage and sadness are evoked by Food, Inc.'s telling of unseen costs of the US government's corn subsidy. Cheap subsidised corn is fed to cattle - animals evolved to eat grass. Their stomachs' react, producing too much acid - the perfect environment for a new deadly strain of E. coli to develop. This pathogen is carried in manure, which covers the animals' hides in feedlots and then infects meat in mechanised disassembly lines. The infected meat sickens and kills Americans, including children. As a result American beef companies are making ''safe'' hamburger meat filler by treating the beef - with ammonia hydroxide. Seventy per cent of US hamburgers contain beef treated with ammonia.

The film covers the devastating impact of genetically modified patent laws in traditional farming that sees some crops now 90 per cent dominated by GM seeds owned by chemical companies. Seventy per cent of food on US supermarket shelves contains an ingredient made from a GM plant.

The result of cheap un-nutritious food is a fat nation where one in three people born after 2000 will develop type 2 diabetes. One in two Hispanics. The film follows one Hispanic family who dine on burgers in the car because they have no time to cook - and a burger is cheaper than two pears or a head of broccoli.

Flashy computer graphics give mind-numbingly sad statistics of an unhealthy national diet an acceptable ''look'' while the soundtrack, like any Hollywood product, gives us emotional cues. The ominous low-frequency drone under the mechanised abattoir scene gives way to country birdcall soundscape under the footage of killing free-range chickens at Joel Salatin's farm.

The footage of animal cruelty and gross mass production of industrial food is gut-turning.

''The industry doesn't want you to know the truth about what you are eating,'' says Schlosser in the film.

''Because if you did, you might not want to eat it.''

Food, inc. has been described as The Inconvenient Truth of food. Let's hope this has more effect on our politicians.

Food, Inc. opens nationally on May 20.

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THIS is an important film. It's a warning. Don't follow the US down the path of food self-regulation. It leads to a nightmarish dystopia where children are killed by burgers, where the raising of animals under appalling conditions happens behind closed doors and where illegal immigrants are poorly paid to mistreat animals under conditions almost as inhumane to them.

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Robert Kenner never set out to make a terrifying film when he started Food, Inc. But along the way, he found the food industry to be stunningly secretive-and what it's hiding to be downright scary. The film shines a bright light on the handful of corporations that, behind a cloak of glitzy marketing campaigns, do the dirty work of putting cheap food on our plates. As Variety put it, the film "does for the supermarket what Jaws did for the beach." Not long after the film opened nationwide, I caught up with Kenner by phone from his Los Angeles home.

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Kinge: As I watched your depicton of conventional farmers in the film, the word I kept thinking of was "sharecropper." For example, individual farmers no longer legally own their own seeds; they must purchase them from biotech giants like Monsanto, and essentially they remain in debt.
There seem to be a lot of similarities between the historic cloaking of information by the tobacco industry and the cloaking of information by the agribusiness industry today.
Kenner: You know, I don't even talk about in the film whether GMOs are good for us or bad for us. But what I find so amazing is Monsanto saying we can't feed the world without [their genetically modified seeds], but then they'll do everything possible to stop you from knowing they're in your food.... [and] if your seeds are so good, why do you have to put seed cleaners out of business? Why can't we have a free market? Why do these farmers have to be sued? Shouldn't your product speak for itself? And it's the power of this corporation to sort of attempt to both patent and dominate this industry that I find of concern. What we tried to do in this film was to create a dialogue about how we eat. And these corporations that didn't want to talk to me in the film, many of them, like Monsanto, go to great lengths to get their message out, but I feel their response is a misleading response. But I'm heartened that there are a number of other companies who have said, "we recognize the great success of this film and we think there should be a conversation."...Troy Roush is sort of an industry farmer, who uses Monsanto products and will defend them on certain levels, though he's also been sued by them, and from his point of view for no cause whatsoever, and it cost him almost half a million dollars to defend himself. Troy was saying that he thinks 95% of farmers in America would like the film and agree with it, but they just need to see it.
With the new federal regulation of tobacco, there is expected to be a lot more transparency around the tobacco industry, but the federal government has always regulated agriculture and yet, as evidenced in your film, there has been little transparency thus far around how food is produced. Do you expect that to change under Obama?
You know what it is? It's that the world has been transformed without us knowing about it and these companies don't want you to thinking about this food. They want that Orwellian myth that it comes from a small farm with a white picket fence and a red barn when in reality our food comes from giant factories. It's become industrialized, but it's not only the chicken and the cow, it's the tomato and the lettuce. We're basically eating food with far fewer nutrients, and it's not healthy. But it's more than that. We're also being denied the right to know what's in it, so it's connecting the dots to the system. And ultimately, I'm optimistic, and when we learned about tobacco ... a few very powerful corporations that had great connections to government and they were financing studies about how their product was not bad for you, and then when we finally found out that this was a total falsehood. And I think when we start to find out about this food is doing to us, we're going to change how the food industry works as well...If we live in a free society and we want to make choices, choice has to be made based on information, and what lengths they'll go to stop you from having that information...So we don't know if there's cloned meat, we don't know if there's GMOs, we don't know if there's rBST. I'm not even saying whether [genetic modification] is good or bad. I'm just saying, if it is good, why wouldn't you want to advertise it?

Well, one thing [happening] is that it looks like this year the FDA will pass regulation that will [remove] food that sits on the shelf that makes us sick - that has E Coli 0157:H7. So unfortunately a lot of these acts still are in favor of large business. On one hand they'll help protect us, on the other hand they keep regulating in favor of large corporations. So I would just say to consumers, whenever possible, get to farmer's markets, support local farmers, I would also say eat organic. Even if we change just one meal a day, we're going to start to improve the system. We're going to vote three times a day with breakfast lunch and dinner but we also have to vote with out votes. Unfortunately right now we're subsidizing food that makes us sick, and if we can create enough of a movement, I think we can change the farm bill to the food bill.

You screened the film for Tom Vilsack, the secretary of the US Department of Agriculture. He's been a supporter of genetically modified foods. How did he respond?
In the film you show that several FDA officials have strong ties to agribusiness giants, calling it a sort of "revolving door" between government and corporate agriculture.
Well, he's a governor from the biggest corn state in the country and he basically was a Democrat from a Republican state. But ya' know I can only quote Michael Pollan in this, saying that Vilsack turned out to be much more open to hearing and listening. So I do think he's sincere, but I also think, as he says that if this movement keeps growing, he will have to listen, if it doesn't nothing's going to change. Certain things will change because you can't have healthcare reform in this country without changing the food system, so they are going to be forced to change things, whether they like it or not. But hopefully as a food movement, we can help force it to change faster.
A good portion of the film focuses on the dichotomy of cheap food versus expensive healthcare: subsidized crops make certain foods dirt-cheap at the check-out counter or fast food window but wreak havoc on human health and put families into debt.
Well, to begin with, we're not opposed to people going from industry to government. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for people who know an industry to go into government to help regulate it. The problem is when they start to rule on things that they have done in industry and then they go back to industry with big raises. There seems to be a certain level of conflict. And it's a pattern that's taken over Washington. I think these things die hard and all I would say is I think we have to start supporting and doing everything we can for small farmers. It's much easier to try to put in legislation for safe foods, but basically it's designed for big corporations, and sometimes it makes it harder for the small farmers, and I think it's going to better for us and our communities and our health if we can support the smaller farmers. And that's not going to be the first instinct in Washington because that's not the way it works. But I think it's that we as consumers have to start to flex our muscles...to help level the playing field so that we support food that's good for us.
The film very briefly touches on herbicide and pesticide chemical runoff finding its way into waterways and also mentions that increased cattle grazing has led to deforestation in, for example, the Amazon. But it leaves it at that. Was it a conscious choice to keep the environmental impacts brief?
[That subsidized corn and soy not only goes into hundreds of food products, but it also acts as cheap feed for livestock]. So basically you now bring this artificially inexpensive corn to these feedlots. And when [a small farmer] grows corn on their own property and is not getting a government subsidy you can't then feed his food to these animals and be in competition to these mega-corporations. So we're subsidizing food that ultimately turns into sugar in our bodies, and all of a sudden, we're getting massive amounts of sugar, because of the corn and soy, and that sugar is making us fat.

We could have gone on about the environment. Ultimately, food accounts for a little over 20-25% of our carbon footprint. Like health reform, you can't have environmental reform without changing the system and what I realized in making this film - perhaps it's obvious but for me it really hit me - is that this is an unsustainable system. It's a brand new system. We've had agricultural for ten thousand years. This system is about 40, 50 years old. And it's not working for two giant reasons. It's based on gasoline, which is a diminishing [resource] and as it starts to run out and as its prices start to get up to those historic highs, we're going to have very expensive food. It takes so much gasoline to grow and transport this food. Also, there is so much pollution involved with this system; we're depleting, poisoning the soil, the riverways, the oceans. So there are many things we don't hit on entirely in the film, but basically what the film is about is connecting the dots to show you that this industrial system is not working.

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Food Inc. Director Robert Kenner speaks on the ills of the food system

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Robert Kenner never set out to make a terrifying film when he started Food, Inc. But along the way, he found the food industry to be stunningly secretive-and what it's hiding to be downright scary. The film shines a bright light on the handful of corporations that, behind a cloak of glitzy marketing campaigns, do the dirty work of putting cheap food on our plates.

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Robert Kenner | Biography and Filmography | 1950

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Eric Matthew Schlosser (born August 17, 1959) is an American journalist and author known for investigative journalism, such as in his books Fast Food Nation (2001), Reefer Madness (2003), and Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety (2013).

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Pollan is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine , a former executive editor for Harper's Magazine , and an author of five books: In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (2008), The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World (2001), A Place of My Own (1997), and Second Nature: A Gardener's Education (1991).