Features
Food for thought
I can debate with my radical friends all day long, but no one can challenge the fact that another sale of one million dollars to Walmart helps to save the world”. So says Gary Hirshberg, CEO of US based organic food company Stonyfield. It is an interesting if slightly contradictory sentence – how can you debate with people all day but not be challenged? And still have time to run a Company?
Hirshberg argues that every big organic food contract with the likes of Walmart means tonnes less biocides and fertilizers used on planet earth. In this context, other Walmart-related issues fade away.
Whatever people may think about the merits or otherwise of selling organic in Walmart, this is one of the standout moments from an organic perspective in the Oscar nominated documentary Food Inc., currently on limited release in Ireland. Perhaps all the more standout in a context of Stonyfield being owned by Danone, and by the latter’s 37% share in Glenisk.
Food Inc.
Food Inc. itself is well worth seeing. Much of the territory covered will be fairly familiar to readers of Organic Matters, as the documentary is based on the best selling books of Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan – Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
That said, it is useful nonetheless to see a graphic and easily understood version of the ideas of the books jump out on the screen at you. Pacey enough to hold anyone’s attention, Food Inc. uses imagery, archive and hidden camera footage to good effect, whilst also managing the balance between the personalised and globalised well.
While documentaries do not often come across as ‘see it in the cinema’ type experiences in the Avatar mode, this one certainly benefits from the big screen. This is because, quite simply, the scale of intensive farming in the US is at times mind boggling. Ariel shorts of never ending fields of corn, or massive slaughterhouses have to be seen to be believed.
The film itself begins with Schlosser and the invention of fast food in the mid 20th Century. It features zippy little graphics that help explain the processes of industrialisation, vertical integration and overall consolidation that have gone on in the agri-food sector, spearheaded by Fast Food and chicken’s intensification in particular.
All the main meat sectors and their industrialisation feature, and the implications for animals, the environment, workers and health, as does the ever more ubiquitous corn and crop patenting. Unintended consequences include food riots and E Coli: 0157: h7. Of the latter, in a typically succinct phrase, Pollan states: “and now this thing that wasn't in the world is in the food system”.
Along with the omnipresence of corporate power, solutions do emerge: the ebullient and evangelistic Joel Salatin of Polyface farm, made famous in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, philosophises whilst working away, including while engaging in some outdoor evisceration. Big organic too gets a robust defense from the aforementioned Hirshberg, as does consumer power through Walmart’s delisting of milk with rBGH (Bovine growth hormones).
The Personal Touch
The film’s strengths come to the fore when real people in their real life situations tell the viewers their stories. Like the distraught chicken grower who allows the documentary makers access to her chicken houses. She speaks of how most chicken growers are so tied to the Company that if they do not agree to upgrades, they loose contracts. Her naturally lit houses were considered inferior to houses in the dark, so she lost her contract.
Likewise with the Vice-President of the Corn Growers Association, Troy Rouch, who becomes more and more uneasy as he explains how power works in the food system. More so again with farmers afraid to talk without darkened rooms and voice overdubs about the effect of corporate power. And then there’s the last man standing, Moe Parr, willing to try to clean machines for seed saving, whilst being sued by Monsanto because this seed cleaning apparently encourages farmers to break the patent law.
However for most viewers, what will probably be remembered as the Mexican family and Kevin’s Mom are perhaps the most heart wrenching. The Mexican family is typically overworked, being away from home from 6 am to 9 pm. Fast food in the car, early and late onset diabetes, and the comparative prices of broccoli, burgers and medication define the families’ food life.
Kevin’s Mom is the mother of a child who died after eating E Coli tainted burgers. She is now a food safety advocate. Her story and how it is filmed are particularly poignant.
What Does It All Mean?
As often is the case, this film is supra American. So does it really matter over here in little old Ireland? In a few significant ways, it does. Whilst Irish outdoor and grass fed farming inevitably looks picturesque compared to the vista presented by Food Inc., it is also the case that the Irish meat and dairy industries are very much globalised agri-food industries. Inputs are sourced from the Americas, including feed components corn and soya.
That said, scales in the European model of farming simply do not compare to those practiced in the Americas. Organic farmers and food businesses in Ireland can certainly point people towards the movie as both a validation and vindication of what they do and why.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma – Bite-Sized Version
Once a children’s version of a book appears, you know the book in some sense encapsulates a Zeitgeist. This has happened to The Omnivore’s Dilemma so younger readers can get a taste for food politics through a perfectly pitched story telling medium.
Aimed at eight to twelve year olds, but suited to any teenager too, Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: the secrets behind what you eat is almost like the notes you would take yourself from the book, spiced up with graphics, pictures and other handy features. Like the big brother, this one traces four meals and their implications. These are: The industrial meal, the industrial organic meal, the local sustainable meal, and the do-it-yourself meal.
All the gory details are in there. The DIY meal – i.e. the hunted mushrooms and wild meat meal – is explored in adventure superhero-like details. Only available on line at present, this one is a great family discussion book that could well send a youngster off on a life mission as a foodie.
It’s well worth adding in when ordering his latest for adults book, Food Rules.
Basket Case
Back home, there has at least been a recent Irish take on the world of farming and food. Basket Case: What’s happening to Ireland’s Food? (Philip Boucher Hayes and Suzanne Campbell) is the first food book in Ireland for years that isn’t just a themed collection of recipes or reviews.
The book is actually as much about processes of change in rural Ireland over the last fifteen years as it is about food. The first one hundred or so pages deal with this change in Ireland, in particular urban encroachment and agri-food restructuring. So urban, Celtic Tiger Ireland, and its swamping of the rural are the meat and two potatoes of this section of the book. Pony lessons, helicopter pads and urbanites complaining about local facilities and farming smells abound.
The book also benefits from being written as that Tiger was being put down, so recession Ireland is the terrain. This increases its relevance. Written in an engaging, fun and funky style, there are however occasional glitches in style between the two authors. The lead author, Boucher-Hayes, asks an awful lot of questions, literally, while Suzanne Campbell's contributions read more like conclusions to the book than integrated sections.
It may be a matter of personal taste, but the David McWilliams-like use of an array of catchy descriptions, (inner culchie, flash paddy) and popular culture references, (the Posh Spice diet, Keira Knightley’s bag, Nell McCafferty’s cigarette) will appeal to some but not all readers.
In part two, the book blossoms. This is more the investigative area, with food labels, food scandals and supermarket power dominating. Occasionally very close to Felicity Lawerence's work in the UK's Guardian newspaper, this section nonetheless covers real food issues in Ireland right now in the required detail.
Sometimes unexpected examples emerge too. My own personal favourite relates to ALDI:
One of the retail food sectors best-kept little secrets is that when you shop in Aldi, you are actually buying many of the same products as those sold by Superquinn, Tescos and Dunnes, but at a fraction of the cost.
Aldi’s meats come from Larry Goodman, the same plants that supply Superquinn. Aldi’s own brand crisps are made by the same company in county Meath that makes Tayto and King Crisps. Their tea and coffee are Bewleys and Robert Roberts. Their yogurts come from a company in Clonakilty that also supply Dunnes, Tesco, Centra, SuperValu and Superquinn. And Aldi flour, which your intuition might suggest comes from a monstrous mill somewhere in the Ukraine, is actually Odlum's flour.
The list is considerably longer; in fact, 40% of Aldi’s produce is sourced in Ireland. But suppliers fret that their primary brands could be damaged if it slipped out that their premium-priced product is exactly the same as the one on offer considerably cheaper in Aldi.
A book that could have done with then deft hand of a sub editor, nonetheless it is both timely and important.
Beyond Celebrity
Though you’d hardly know it at times, there is more to food than TV chefs and a near endless supply of glossy tabletop recipe books. Food is a lens through which we can view society, because everybody eats. And what food says about society can be seen more clearly if you choose to engage with these films and books.
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