The Monsters in America’s Kitchen
“Food, Inc 2” and the Horrors of the American Food Industrial Complex
Midway through Robert Kenner’s and Melissa Robledo’s important new film, Food, Inc 2, which is produced by and features Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, I started to do an obsessive inventory of what’s in my kitchen—not just in terms of our food’s nutritional content, but where it came from, who made it, and, importantly, who picked and processed it and how they were treated.
Then I mapped out what’s in our local market, in the Albertson’s down the hill, in the Costco a few blocks away, at the 7-11 across the street, and everywhere else, including, horrifyingly, in our local schools. Ultra-processed foods from commodity crops, factory farmed meats, fruits and vegetables picked by exploited farmworkers…as far as the eye can see.
As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago here, the most obvious aspect of the ways the food industry has colonized our digestive systems is through ultra-processed foods. The story Food, Inc 2 tells, though, is much more comprehensive. This film takes a darker view, if that’s possible, than its predecessor, Food, Inc, on what ails us and how, and if, we can stop it.
Pollan begins Food, Inc 2 by noting that “food is a set of relationships” and that “there’s a lot at stake when you sit down to eat.” Our problems as Americans in 2024 is that the sets of relationships that produce our food are invisible to us, most often by design.
The corporate food industry has penetrated every aspect of our lives, much to our peril as we found out during the pandemic. In 2020, both Pollan and Schlosser reported on the grim practices of the meatpacking industry, which revealed just how fragile our food system had become. Both of their articles show through the example of Tyson Foods and the rampant Covid outbreaks amongst their low-wage meat packers how weak enforcement of antitrust laws has led to the massive consolidation of food corporations thus creating a food system incapable of adapting to unpredictable catastrophes—and also one that is destroying our health and the planet along with it.
Food, Inc 2 expands on Pollan’s and Schlosser’s reporting and is centered on their contention that antitrust legislation needs to be assiduously enforced—by presumably breaking up the near-monopolies a handful of food corporations have over pretty much most of what we eat—and that U.S. agricultural policy needs to focus on citizens and not corporations to subsidize healthy, diverse food crops and not commodity crops like soy and corn. These two changes, they argue, would result in a much more resilient and locally and regionally based food system that would be transformative in many fundamental ways.
The film takes us on a journey through the webs of food production in the U.S. and how the corporate takeover of the food system has impacted almost everything. We spend time with exploited and invisible Latino and Haitian farmworkers as they pick tomatoes in Florida and try to advocate for fair wages and better working conditions.
A sheriff in Indiana shares his experiences outing the Tyson meatpacking plant for violating Covid policies and causing the virus to spread from its heavily infected workers into the community. When the community wanted the plant to shut down for 10-14 days to quell the outbreak, Tyson said no, and, with the other big meat corporations, appealed to the Trump White House to issue an executive order to keep meat packing plants open under the Defense Production Act (something it was not designed to do), which it granted. Tyson, by the way, sends most of its meat to China and other countries, so this had nothing to do with it being able to “Feed America” but had everything to do with maintaining its profits.
The film then goes into the dangers of monopolies by noting the scaling back of antitrust legislation enforcement beginning in 1980, which enabled food companies to gobble up their competitors and grow into the massive entities we see today. Eye poppingly, for example, 85% of meat is produced by only four companies, 83% of breakfast cereal comes from three companies, 70% of soda is produced by 3 three companies, and, as we discovered, just two companies produce 80% of baby formula.
Why is all this consolidation a problem? As we saw with the formula shortages of a couple of years ago, when so few companies corner the market, if there’s a supply chain issue, people suffer because they can’t get what they need. Also, without competition, prices are higher (as are profits of course) and wages are lower. But this system is weak and prone to getting out of control in order to constantly maximize profits.
When there are feedlots in the desert so companies can fatten as many cattle as possible, that creates an environmental catastrophe (not to mention a terrible situation for the animals awaiting slaughter). But, as Pollan puts it, this system is designed to put “profits over sustainability.”
The film features the work of Senators Jon Tester of Montana and Cory Booker of New Jersey, who in their roles on the Senate Agriculture Committee are trying to do something about the U.S.’s broken food system. It casts them in a positive light, but it downplays the enormous forces arrayed against such institutional change.
The film also stays away from any thorough-going critique of capitalism, which has enabled our corporatized food system to thrive. Such a critique would have provided a history of not only where antitrust legislation came from (to blunt the power of monopolies beginning in the 1890s), but also context for the rollback of its enforcement in a much deeper way than merely focusing on the efforts of legislators. But clearly that is not a lens Pollan is comfortable with. As Zoe Williams notes in her interview with him in the Guardian:
While Food, Inc 2 is about the US, so many of its elements are true of food systems across … well, for brevity, I would call it “late capitalism”, but Pollan pushes back on that. “Capitalism is a game that can be played according to different rules,” he says. “We can just change the rules.”
I generally love Michael Pollan, but this seems either hopelessly naïve or completely disingenuous when you take into account that those who have the power to make and change the rules of capitalism are one and the same and thus have no interest in changing the game, as evidenced by Trump’s executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to protect the economic interests of the meat packing conglomerates over the well-being of their workers and the communities they live in.
Another example of how the film shies away from a deeper economic analysis is that while it spotlights the plight of low wage workers in the fast food and agricultural industries, it doesn’t note that unionization would immeasurably support them, except very briefly at the end with its list of ways we can solve this mess. Schlosser notes the importance of unions in the article he wrote that helped inspire the film, but Food, Inc 2 itself is silent on the power of unions to support and give voice to the most exploited among us. Unions are the entities that can redress many of the excesses of capital by enabling workers to define the terms of their work and earn fair wages for their labor.
One of the film’s weirder turns is into the area of technology, from Impossible Meats and the drive to replace animals, to scientific food stuffs and growing chicken and beef in giant stainless steel vats. All science fiction stuff that as Pollan rightly points out, ultimately distracts from the real issues facing us right now with our planet and the food it produces.
The last part focuses on various projects to reform the food system and calls to shift government policies. My favorite is this wonderful thing called a “Stockcropper” that has a moveable pen of goats and sheep at the front and pigs at the back—a mini moving barn. The goats and sheep mow the spent crops first and then the pigs bring up the rear as they rootle around among the leftovers, digging and pooping along the way. This naturally and sustainably clears and fertilizes land for new crops and humanely raises healthy animals.
My overall assessment, despite there being some missed opportunities for more depth, is that like its predecessor, Food, Inc 2 is an important film for our times. Now more than ever with the earth hanging in the balance, we need to rein in the power of Big Food. Our very lives depend on it.