Food, Inc. (2009)
When I moved to Philadelphia for a brief hiatus from post-graduate life in Denver in 2002, 
which was at that point the only major city I had come to know intimately, I wanted to experience something new. Wiping the slate clean, I left for northeast Philadelphia on a one-way flight with two suitcases of belongings. I knew no one in the city except for a handful of extended family members in the suburbs, so it would be up to me to navigate this neighborhood, a place called Port Richmond, the place where both my parents were born and raised within six blocks of one another, and where my ailing grandmother kept a house while she resided in Colorado with my parents.
Her empty home was my ticket to Port Richmond. In its heyday, the neighborhood was an eastern European enclave of row homes with movie theaters every few blocks, clothing stores, shoe stores, and candy shops; now it was quickly falling victim to poor infrastructure and declines in local businesses. There were still a few shops--mostly Polish butchers and bakeries--left in the area when I arrived, but the elderly population that had been living there for the past 60 years or more were dying out. Almost all of their kids, the generation that includes both my parents, had a long time ago abandoned the area for the western or northern suburbs.
Outside of a local 24-hour restaurant, the Aramingo Diner that touts the best cheesecake in Philly, and an IHOP, there were not many places to dine out. About eight or so blocks to the west at the El station at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues--"K&A," a corner of the city that, depending on the time of day, looked like an abandoned demilitarized zone--you could find fast food places selling fried chicken; and greasy hoagie and pizza joints were scattered every few blocks from there eastward, too. In short, Port Richmond, Philadelphia is an economically depressed area that offers few options for healthful diversions (its parks and sidewalks lay mostly in disrepair, especially the further westward you travel), and even fewer for healthful dining. One of the first things I noticed in my mail delivery was an Acme supermarket flyer advertising buy-one-get-one-free promotions on Oreo cookies, Doritos, and 2-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. If the people of Richmond and the surrounding neighborhoods are on a tight budget, I wondered then, how could they afford anything else but this kind of food?
The reason for this backstory leads me to my afternoon yesterday that was spent watching Robert Kenner's new documentary Food, Inc., where this, one of the film's many points was reiterated to me: fresh vegetables and fruits have become a luxury of a more financially stable class. You don't necessarily have to be rich to buy a bunch of broccoli, but as the Burger King-fed family of four in the film demonstrated, the price of those green, healthful bunches buys them more "filling" food like chips and soda in their place. And if the dusty abandon of Richmond's Acme produce section (at least how I left it in 2003) is a measure of how people are forced to eat, there is a national health epidemic in the U.S.
In a lot of ways the revelation of facts in Food, Inc. is not that revelatory. I am not the only one who has come of age and noticed the discrepancies between supermarkets' promotional products and what its customers need. Getting more for your money is the calling card of the working class, but that motto is ingrained widely in collective American thought too. It's a matter of cheapness, not quality. It's a matter of seeing things in terms of volume, rather than in measures of what's actually needed. This mentality isn't limited to the food industry either. If you've ever been to the Gap and found multiples of a $40 t-shirt on the clearance rack for $6.99 you can see this clothing behemoth operates under the same business model. It's a very American thing to make sure we have a lot of something, regardless of need or quality. So many corporations wouldn't be in business if this was not the case.
Yet as Food, Inc. helpfully reminds us, there are plenty of people who have no alternatives to the fast foods and junk foods on promotion. People have to eat. When the privatization of food sales is narrowed to five or less companies countrywide, as the beef, pork, chicken, and corn industries are in the U.S., the gargantuan supplies they are able to produce must be sold. And so, those genetically modified foods get marked down and the health of the consumer, some of whom have few or no alternative products in their economic reach, suffers. A Belarusian woman who I made friends with during my stay in Philly told me a saying she has in her country: "I'm not rich enough to buy cheap things," meaning, as a working class woman, she didn't have enough money to buy products that needed to be repeatedly replaced because they were made with sub par materials, or were constructed poorly. The ideal being that you spend money on a few good things and you have them for a long time, perhaps a lifetime. It's an investment. And if the long-term benefits of a healthy diet mean people have more energy, feel better, and get sick less, it is about time we think of our food in the same way.
How we concretely resolve this issue is, however, something only lightly touched upon by the film. On the one hand, it's wonderful to see a documentary that lifts the veil from this superpower exhibited so widely, on over 50 screens in its second weekend; that means the message is getting out to audiences that are historically unlikely to see a documentary at all, let alone for ten dollars or more on the big screen. On the other hand, there is something redundant and boring about the spoon-fed nature of the documentary's structure. As discussed with my movie companion yesterday, this kind of documentary is becoming a genre in its own right. It's the sort that proceeds with a multitude of stories that can somehow only be connected with separate introductory titles on a black screen. Personally, I admire documentaries that simply begin. The Maysles brothers and D.A. Pennebaker perfected this art, and they did it just by turning on the camera to begin a scene. There doesn't have to be a didactic link pointing us from one scene to the next; modern film audiences have come to understand the edited course of time to know when they've moved from one topic to the next in a different space.
There was a recent Frontline episode that covered a similar topic as Food, Inc.'s in greater depth, where their investigation unfolded organically and quite engagingly. While I don't expect a popular documentary to be written with the intellectual rigor of a Frontline special, I still hope that in its colloquiality it can cover all of its highly-related main topics in one narrative arc. When Food, Inc.'s momentum was halted by the numerous and distracting fade-to-blacks, it seemed like a shot of one of its primary authorities, Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) could have easily bridged the gaps with further dialogue. And perhaps because of this jerky structure, Food, Inc. never covered one point in enough depth to help incite real, concrete action from its audience. It seemed instead like a well put together public service announcement, never answering the question: What does the average consumer do to demand healthful change?
Chipping away at this cause individually is truly a self-defeating action, which is why Food, Inc. was a lost opportunity to discuss the needed proliferation of local farming operations, both urban and rural, that would be able to sustain communities across the nation without an oppressive conglomerate.
A couple of years ago I worked briefly with filmmaker Judith Helfand on just this issue, local urban farming that sustains small populations in low-income communities. In our work together we met urban farmers whose goal was to grow produce and sell it from a truck that makes its rounds daily through the neighborhood. These are areas on the south side of Chicago that have no access to a Whole Foods, or even the more affordable Trader Joe's. It would provide people in disadvantaged areas of the south side with fresh organic herbs and vegetables instead of corner 
convenience store foodstuffs like chips, candy and other processed foods. Food, Inc. comes close to addressing the benefit of these farms with the gleeful introduction of Virginia-based organic farmer Joel Salatin. His customers drive from as far as 300 miles away for a fresh chicken, and he admits he isn't sure how he'd maintain the integrity of his farming methods if an increase in demand took hold. This was an immediate entrance for Kenner to discuss the implementation of many local farms per area, versus using only one that keeps consumers stagnant in our current food production system, keeping organic food out of reach from working class people.
This is one of Food, Inc.'s missed chances at depth of subject matter rather than breadth, and the movie ends quietly. A fade to black with a new round of dissolving title cards concludes the show with a web address I can't remember. Then again, if each night's audience goes home to prepare a healthy dinner in place of delivery, maybe its mission has been accomplished. But that pat on the back will hardly suffice in the long run. What happens next?
