Entry #7.5: Fresh Food part 2

 Hey again. This is a companion piece to my previous entry. This is a rhetorical analysis of the movie Food, Inc. While it's very similar to the previous film I covered, that shouldn't be a reason to not talk about it. Besides, comparing covered information can help form a more complete view on an issue. Food Inc is much more varied, covering more of the food process as a whole over Fresh which focuses on farmers and their stocks.

The film opens on a narrator describing the current state of food sale in America while a camera flies through a super market, focusing on various items as the narrator focuses what he says on related topics. The narrator is engaging in rhetorical analysis, to some degree, or the image presented by food manufacturers. They're trying to sell the customer the idea that their food was raised ideally, when often the portrayal doesn't even realistically represent basic practices. 

The movie then shifts to talk about how pervasive fast food is. This segment opens on an investigative reporter named Eric Schlosser ordering a burger at a diner. He talks about his surprise driving him to lift the veil on the industrial food systems. They then shift to talking about how industrial farming was introduced, starting with how fast food needed to industrialize to cut costs. The talk about how the MacDonald's are the origin of this practice. They then specifically highlight chickens to show the effects this has had, such as increasing the chicken size and mechanizing the process. 

There's a later segment about how people are engineering the food. Corn is one of the biggest examples, given how it alters foods as corn syrup, and given how corn itself has been altered over the years. They talk about how the cheap corn in the food cycle is leveraged to sustain this kind of factory farming. Corn is used as feed for cows because it fattens them up faster than the grass they're supposed to eat do. They push harder on a dark tone by going into how the system is producing a new form of E.coli and the horrible conditions for the animals. And they then play a montage of people being reported on the news for getting E.coli from various tainted foods.

Another later segment focuses on how the current quality of meat contributes to diabetes, citing that 1 in 3 will get early onset diabetes. Like in the movie Fresh, time is placed on how the centralization is impacting the health of the food that's being processed. Burgers can have meat from lots of different cows, increasing the odds that there will be tainted meat in the products. They talk about how dishonest the industry is and cite the lack of correction, lack of interview, and the detrimental effects of the practices of the industry. 

They then stress how fast we need to act, and say that trying for an ideal "getting food from local farmers" plan won't work in all cases. They bring in Gary Hirshberg to talk about how big businesses are the sources of the issues and how he wants to try and spread his eco-friendly alternatives. He also gives his opinion that environmentalists should shy away from playing the underdog. He then goes around a food exhibition calling out different brand names as the companies that actually own the recipes, saying several names more than once, such as Kellogg. 

Towards the end of the movie they start touching on how the industrial processes uses up large amounts of gas and how the monocultures are fragile to environmental shocks. They then show footage of some of the brutal treatment of the animals in the system, lame cows, rivers of pig fecal mater, and they show a clip talking about how little can be done to help find the sources of problems. The movie ends by talking about how people need to overcome their feelings of powerlessness and band together, akin to the push against tobacco. They have a call to action and the film ends on a text scroll that gives various factoids about the issues and gives generalized advice.

This movie is a bit more dense than Fresh was. It's hard to get down the important parts because there's so much info in such a tight run time. But the actual info given on the topics is still mostly shallow. Though it's certainly deeper than Fresh. I personally agree with the idea that these eco-friendly practices need much more time in the limelight, and more people need to get informed about the current status of the food industry. For the purposes of getting to people, this approach is a little bit more effective. The pace is short enough to consider the issues while the faster passing means there are fewer awkward pauses or over focus on something to make viewers board. But with a still mostly shallow approach, it's still introductory as opposed to something that could actually direct local action. These movies should exist and be spread around, but they should be a springboard into deeper research.

Kenner, R., & Adler, M. (2008). Food, inc. Food, Inc. Retrieved November 20, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/31813990.