Food, Inc.

So maybe you read "Fast Food Nation" or "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and thought to yourself, "This is pretty fascinating, illuminating, even stomach-churning stuff...But damnit, I need some audio/visual aids to really send the points home."

The movie for you to see, then, is "Food, Inc.", which is at the Nuart in Los Angeles and presumably will open wider. David Edelstein says it best:

After an hour and a half of sighing, wincing, and clucking over the manifold outrages portrayed in Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., I gave up the thought of “reviewing” the documentary and decided, instead, to exhort you: See it. Bring your kids if you have them. Bring someone else’s kids if you don’t. The message is nothing new if you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (both are in the film). But every frame makes you choke on your popcorn—if for no other reason than the focus on government-underwritten corn and the companies who put it into everything from soda to Midol to the gassy, E. coli–ridden bellies of factory-farmed cows. The sheer scale of the movie is mind-blowing—it touches on every aspect of modern life. It’s the documentary equivalent of The Matrix: It shows us how we’re living in a simulacrum, fed by machines run by larger machines with names like Monsanto, Perdue, Tyson, and the handful of other corporations that make everything. We humans can win, but we should hurry, before Monsanto makes a time machine and sends back a Terminator to get rid of Schlosser and Pollan.

If nothing else, the movie has convinced me to TRY buying only organic food products for a while. The immediate cost is slightly higher, but (the film makes the case) the long-term savings, to your healthy, the rest of the world, and the future, make up the difference many times over, so...

Organic for a month! Let's try it!

Who's with me?