As POV warms up for its Fall 2011, it’s re-airing a couple of important documentaries. The first is this week’s Food, Inc., which opens with the story of Carole Morrison, a grower for Perdue Chicken. She runs what amounts to a factory, producing meat efficiently and inhumanely. She’s speaking out now, she says, because “I’m just to the point that it doesn’t matter anymore. Something has to be said.” The chicken factory — like so many others that produce food for corporations to sell — is premised on quantity. When the film reveals in a note that Morrison’s farm was “terminated,” you have to think: even as she’s righteous here, she’s also out of work, for not toeing a corporate-ordained line. Robert Kenner’s Academy Award-nominated documentary provides other stories to compound your sense that something is very wrong here. Tomatoes — and corn, cows, and pigs — are genetically engineered. As the camera shows rows of fat red fruits in a supermarket, the voiceover reveals, “Although it looks like a tomato, it’s kind of a notional tomato, the idea of a tomato.” Notional food. It’s as bad as it sounds.
See PopMatters‘ review.