The more you think about it, it makes sense that Magnolia—which has recently brought audiences cutting-edge horror fare such as Surveillance, Let the Right One In, and Splinter—would release this, quite possibly the scariest film of the year...

But of course the difference is that this is a doc... and a very sober one at that. Nothing, or almost nothing, sensationalistic about what director Robert Kenner has done here. Drawing heavily on the work of Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Food, Inc. presents information that may not be brand spanking new to many viewers. Specifically, they may already be familiar with the film’s arguments about how average farmers, environmental sustainability/diversity, consumer health, and workers' rights are all endangered by abuses by a handful of ginormous agribusiness concerns. And do these corporations do such things out of motives that might be summed up by the phrase "sheer evil"? Hardly. Rather, the film takes pains to lay out a systemic analysis that shows how a combination of forces undermine, almost invisibly, what might be called the “organic infrastructure” of our health and, ultimately, the planet’s health (both biologic and economic). These forces include meat producers catering to the fast food industry (its biggest purchaser), government making the biologically-unwise feeding of corn to cattle profitable through subsidies, and a general lack of political will to impact practices that spell short-term profit but long-term disaster.

Laying out these arguments—coolly, historically—are Schlosser and Pollan, two of Food, Inc.’s dominant talking heads, and their fair-minded tone goes a long way toward establishing credibility. Indeed, the film opens with Schlosser ordering a cheeseburger in a diner, as if to say, “Hey, look, he’s not a radical vegan or elitist foodie—he’s just a regular guy who’s blowing the whistle on some unsavory practices.” Yet the film’s main virtue is that it doesn’t rely too heavily on such experts—it's a doc populated by people, not heads or brains, which helps maintain a refreshingly centrist and commonsense point of view as well as makes the presentation more compelling overall. Food, Inc. brings us the unforgettable voices of farmers, parents, and others who are struggling to earn a living, raise healthy families, and protect the public at large.

So don’t look for a lot of cutesy animations, intentionally provocative acts (à la Michael Moore) or sweeping, hyperbolic leftist generalities (à la 2004’s intellectually irresponsible doc The Corporation).

The focus is, for the most part, narrow, and the results are, for the most, quietly devastating. Indeed, Kenner’s low-key approach may make the movie not "exciting" enough for audiences that have grown used to more flashy exposés in recent years. You actually have to think about what’s being said, and probably discuss the ideas with a friend on the way out of the theater, to really let them sink in. Not to say that the film’s coverage of recent E. Coli outbreaks, including the one last year via spinach, doesn’t lend both timeliness and urgency to the proceedings. Kenner invites the audience to see these not as isolated incidents caused by a single irresponsible food packager, meat packer, or slaughterhouse but part and parcel of what the U.S. as a nation has decided to settle for when it comes to the food we eat. Simply put, there are no quick fixes to a complex problem that’s decades in the making.

Still, personal responsibility seems like a good place to start. I only wish that someone had told this to the Orozcos, a family that’s portrayed as having no options but to eat drive-thru fast food exclusively because of the long hours they work and the fact that it’s far cheaper than, say, broccoli. While the broader and deeper point of why corn-fed meat is artificially low in price is well-taken, this borderline whining from a particular family feels like deck-stacking. It’s as if the parents have not made decisions throughout their lives about how and where to work and how and where to raise their children, but are somehow helpless victims of capitalism with no choice except to make their kids obese and give themselves heart attacks. After all, if the price of crystal meth fell so that it represented a better “deal” in terms of getting the kids through the school day, would that be a viable option? Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh, but it’s a shame that Food, Inc. briefly loses its way in this segment. After all, if corporations are being asked to make hard choices that affect their bottom lines, shouldn’t individual households, at least to some degree, do the same?

The Orozcos in FOOD, INC., a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In any case, you get the idea: there’s a great deal of, if you’ll pardon the expression, food for thought here. In fact, anyone who's reasonably inquisitive, observant, or media literate already probably suspects that the bucolic images of quaint, wholesome, sunshine-bright farms that we encounter on supermarket food packaging doesn't quite convey the truth about how the contents came to be. In truth, the food we buy and eat every day doesn’t come from “farms” at all in many cases—it comes from factories, Industrial Age ones at that, and Food, Inc. invites us to chew on that fact for a while.