Critical Critics
What the Critics Say
….About The Film
“…It asks only those questions which can be answered with "Corporate/fast food agriculture sucks!" and doesn't compel the viewer to look at a larger picture which includes a realistic view of history and people who cannot afford to shop at Whole Foods.”
http://powervoyeur.blogspot.com/2009/04/wff-09-review-food-inc.html
…About the Filmmaker’s Views
"We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven. We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops. We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century. We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production." – Dr. Nina Fedoroff, member, National Academy of Sciences, administrator of the Agency for International Development, science and technology advisory to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the BBC, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7974995.stm
“The first giant that must be slain is the middle- and upper-class love affair with peasant agriculture. With the near-total urbanization of these classes in both the United States and Europe, rural simplicity has acquired a strange allure. Peasant life is prized as organic in both its literal and its metaphoric sense. (Prince Charles is one of its leading apostles.) In its literal sense, organic agricultural production is now a premium product, a luxury brand….In its metaphoric sense, it represents the antithesis of the large, hierarchical, pressured organizations in which the middle classes now work….Peasants, like pandas, are to be preserved. But distressingly, peasants, like pandas, show little inclination to reproduce themselves. Given the chance, peasants seek local wage jobs, and their offspring head to the cities. This is because at low-income levels, rural bliss is precarious, isolated, and tedious. The peasant life forces millions of ordinary people into the role of entrepreneur, a role for which most are ill suited. In successful economies, entrepreneurship is a minority pursuit; most people opt for wage employment so that others can have the worry and grind of running a business. And reluctant peasants are right: their mode of production is ill suited to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful. In modern agriculture, technology is fast-evolving, investment is lumpy, the private provision of transportation infrastructure is necessary to counter the lack of its public provision, consumer food fashions are fast-changing and best met by integrated marketing chains, and regulatory standards are rising toward the holy grail of the traceability of produce back to its source. Far from being the answer to global poverty, organic self-sufficiency is a luxury lifestyle. It is appropriate for burnt-out investment bankers, not for hungry families.” “The Politics of Hunger: How Illusion and Greed Fan the Food Crisis,” by Paul Collier, Ph.D., Oxford Unviersity. http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64607/paul-collier/the-politics-of-hunger
“A common perception is that pasture-based, low-input dairy systems characteristic of the 1940s were more conducive to environmental stewardship than modern milk production systems…. Modern dairy practices require considerably fewer resources than dairying in 1944 with 21 percent of animals, 23 percent of feedstuffs, 35 percent of the water and only 10 percent of the land required to produce the same one billion kg of milk. Waste outputs were similarly reduced, with modern dairy systems producing 24 percent of the manure, 43 percent CH4 and 56 percent N2O per billion kg of milk compared to equivalent milk from historical dairying. The carbon footprint per billion kg of milk produced in 2007 was 37 percent of equivalent milk production in 1944. To fulfill the increasing U.S. population’s requirement for dairy products it is essential to adopt management practices and technologies that improve productive efficiency allowing milk production to be increased while reducing resource use and mitigating environmental impact.”
Journal of Animal Science, March 13, 2009, http://jas.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/jas.2009-1781v1
“We’ve gotten so good at growing food that we’ve gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we’d like to go back to what we think is a more natural way. But I’m afraid we can’t, in part, because there are just too many of us in this world. If everybody switched to organic farming, we couldn’t support the earth’s current population — maybe half.” -- Dr. Nina Fedoroff, member, National Academy of Sciences, administrator of the Agency for International Development science and technology advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/science/19conv.html?_r=1
“Steven Shaw, a food writer and a founder of the food Web site eGullet, said Slow Food succeeded early on because it mixed hedonism with a leftist political agenda. But, he contends, its strong antitechnology, antiglobalization views are lost on the average member. ‘Most people I know who go to Slow Food events are the culinary equivalents of the guys in college who go to protests to meet girls,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t care less about the ideology.’” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/dining/23slow.html?pagewanted=2
“The major weakness of….criticisms of fast food is that they are based on the conviction, often implicit, that the consumption of a certain product (comics, photo stories, quiz games, or fast food) cannot really be enjoyed, or cannot have a rational justification; the success of that product, therefore, shall be due to the propaganda (mass media, advertising), to mass conformism, or to the decay and barbarization of culture. But the premises of the argument are unsound. The first idea is not only elitist, but also unproven; on the other hand, it is strictly connected to the second idea, i.e. that a given consumption can be objectively irrational (which is contradicted by the fact that a good’s utility is mostly subjective). These two biases prevent SF from recognizing that fast food, like other mass products, attract many consumers not because of their lack of culture or of the daze induced by the media and advertising, but because they offer goods of fast consumption and at a low price for people without much time and/or money. These are, one should say, quite reasonable motives, and which by themselves are capable of wholly explaining the success of fast food.” “The Ideology of Slow Food,” by Luca Simonetti, http://www.rachellaudan.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/the-ideology-of-slow-food2.pdf
“Even to other, lower-ranking elites, Pollan can be less than sympathetic. A woman calling herself "sustainablemom" wrote in to Pollan's blog to ask: "What does a mother supporting a family on a budget do? I can't research all the farms." Pollan's response to the mom with no time? She should check out the links he provides to 14 Web sites, then read five books. What Pollan fails to explicitly acknowledge, or perhaps even to concede at all, is that his brand of boutique eating is a luxury good. He's rich (not that there's anything wrong with that), so he can afford to refuse beef when he isn't sure the cows have been allowed to graze on grass their entire lives. He has time to keep a vegetable garden. When he turns up his nose at "jet-setting Argentine asparagus" from Whole Foods because it "tasted like damp cardboard," he demonstrates a refined palate that separates him not only from the masses shopping at Wal-Mart but from the yuppies shopping at Whole Foods. When he further frets that such veggies are "floating on a sinking sea of petroleum" he demonstrates a refined political sensibility. And while Pollan is free to hope that someday everyone will be able to eat just as he does, he can't make a useful connection with sustainablemom.” “How the Upper Crust Eats,” http://www.reason.com/news/show/38387.html