FFN freaked me out so much I stopped eating at McD's for all time. Wonder how bad this movie is going to be.

After watching that trailer, it does seem like an interesting movie to watch, but it certainly seems like it has a very specific agenda. Pro-local food sources are certainly a great way to go, and organic may be one of the most healthy ways to eat. However, it would be very difficult to feed all the people in world, or even in our own country for that matter, if all we grew was local, organic food. I'm interested in watching this movie for sure.

"In the thrall of agribusiness", Shirley?

The problem is that no matter how good food gets, no matter how safe it becomes, no matter how much the world improves, there will be fear-mongering documentaries like this one to scare the sheep of the world into demanding that everything be "improved".

You think it was better 100 years ago? Heh. Yeah, wish you could go back in time and test THAT theory.

@Pibbs: Sadly, most of the organic food is produced by the same companies that produce non-organic food.

I love how Bush is somehow to blame for... what exactly? Talk about non sequitur.

Corporate farming is the reason why we have enough to eat. I'd love to see the antiquated family farmers sustain the entire country. Welcome to the 21st century. Agribusiness is not evil.

@Pibbs: In an interview on Elliott in the Morning (WWDC 101), the director was very open that while the film did have an agenda it was more about educating consumers based on where their food is coming from, what's in it, the country of origin and health issues. Many consumers were unaware that much of the food they were eating came from China, overseas, had no idea what was in it, etc.

It was very interesting, actually.

@OMG!ToOMG!,ByMyPonies!_GitEmSteveDave: I saw Certified Organic Lays potato chips the other day. I lol'd.

Auto starting videos are the debbil.

@OMG!ToOMG!,ByMyPonies!_GitEmSteveDave: Agreed. And I still don't buy into the whole "Organic is going to change your life." routine.

@Featherstonehaugh: Corporate farming is why we have too many people. Its also why we have enough bad food to eat. Take into account the damage it does to the environment and agribusiness most certainly evil.

@Featherstonehaugh: So you have no problem with agribusiness overlords who decide how many chemicals are in what you eat, without regard #1 for whether or not said chemicals might be harmful to humans?

And gubbamint subsidies and protections for the same agribusinesses (i.e. to keep the price of sugar in the US higher than the rest of the world and block imports of sugar)?

Just curious.

@Radi0logy: Yes and no.

I bet some of the conditions were worse however, they did not have the same amount of crap thrown in it. Not everything I eat needs growth hormones and HFCS in it.

Problem is we created the FDA and over the years each president removed it's power little by little and the ones left scrambled to make money by collecting payola to keep a blind eye to conditions around them

My issue is foreign food, no need for it in this country. Stop the use of hormones and foreign imports and you'll see vastly improved food.

btw bush is not to blame for our FDA and current food conditions even slightly.

You are being naive. Agribusiness is just that...a BUSINESS. Companies like Monsanto and Cargill are not making widgets or pushing papers, they are producing food for their fellow humans to ingest. That commitment should come with a higher sense of responsibility, one greater than the bottom line. GMO crops, inhumane treatment of animals, easing of government regulations etc. are all actions that are motivated by greed. The small independent farmers featured in this film are not only motivated by money, although they are running a business. Turning a profit is not the only thing they care about. Before passing judgment on this people who put this film together do some research into what motivated them to make the movie.

@dbshaw: we need to go back to local farmers only and stop developments from their continued destruction of forests and old farm lands.

build up not out.

@larrymac: Flashblock addin for Firefox is the angil.

@larrymac: No, the debbil is the Metric System.

The Angel, however, is Firefox and the NoScript add-on.

@Skipweasel: I am serious, and don't call me Shirley.

@dbshaw:

Too many people? Amateur eugenics are not welcome. It's not your little private planet.

@Matthew Broder: wow you're pretty naive you should wake up and smell the rat feces in your coco puffs.

@Featherstonehaugh: True that. Any recent documentary that feels the need to put clips of President Bush in there and blame him for anything and everything makes me highly suspicious.

@dbshaw: Feeding people is certainly evil.

A balance needs to be struck between the need to feed an ever-growing population and safety standards.

Despite recent spates of health warnings, I have yet to worry at the grocery store. The amount of foodborne-illness-related deaths in this country are miniscule, and are not growing more quickly than the population. Consumerist's campaign of harping on agribusiness companies has always seemed overstated to me. If those stories are taking resources away from more worthy targets (from a death/pop. perspective) like unsafe cars and medications it's a shame.

@Unsolicited Advice: You misunderstand. Not to worry though, its a common misunderstanding. Most people think food production is increased to feed an expanding population. In fact the reason people believe this is because it is in the interest of people who profit on a global scale from selling food to promote this belief. It is however false. In actuality the population grows to meet an expanded available food supply.

@Pibbs: There's this idea called "carrying capacity," which basically says no region -- we'll make countries our regions for easy of discussion -- should be populated beyond what it can "carry" on its own natural resources, particularly food and water resources. It's not quite as harsh as it initially sounds. Let's imagine that country A (which shall be America!) has a carrying capacity w/r/t food of, oh, 800 million people. (We've got good cropland here; I'm sure it's actually much higher, even if we're growing organic -- there are new organic technologies that raise yields dramatically and reduce costs compared to corporate agriculture.)

Now country B will somewhere with poor agricultural land that has a carrying capacity of 20 million w/r/t food. Country B is at 25 million, a famine hits, and what does Country A (with only 400 million of its 800 million people limit) do? Send food. So Country B's 25 million people survive, and do what people do, which is procreate, and get up to 30 million, and then another famine hits. What does Country A do? Send food. And so on and so on, every time helping Country B sustain a population well above its carrying capacity and that population KEEPS INCREASING, so that at some point when Country A can't or won't intervene, instead of 5 million dying in the initial famine, Country B will be looking at the deaths of 20 million people or 30 million or 40 million; the higher the population is above carrying capacity, the more catastrophic this "final famine" will be.

(Which is an ethical problem I don't have a good answer for -- I think it makes you a special kind of bad person when you look at starving children and say, "Look, I can't give you food because in the future, you'll just starve MORE" ... but it's also pretty horrific to "help" people just so they can suffer more in the future, and in a lot of poor countries the kinds of society-wide solutions that would be necessary can't take hold because there's too much corruption, turmoil, weak governments, etc.)

Anyway, people might not be advocating feeding all the people in the world. You can fairly ethically come down on either side of the question. And local food chains (regardless of how we're defining local, as long as it's "sub-national") turn out to be a pretty important part of national security, since the more stretched out and international your food chain is, the more vulnerable it is to attack; but your nation also becomes more economically vulnerable and more vulnerable to political pressure and to turmoil in other parts of the world. Producing food for the US *in* the US not only creates jobs and all that good stuff, but makes the US less vulnerable to international pressure. And the more local the food chains are, the less-pressured they are by things like transit costs.

Um, I think I strayed somewhat off my point there. Which was -- oh yeah. Feeding the entire world might not be the goal.

@Unsolicited Advice: so you are in disagreement with idea that we are overpopulated?

you should get out more.

@Chumas: Fast Food Nation made me hungry. I went to Wendy's after I watched it.

@Radi0logy: You're painting with an awfully broad brush, and panning a movie you haven't even seen.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Wow. +1

@GuinevereRucker: Yes, people should realize that nothing is his fault. Except the good things, like invading Iraq.

@Unsolicited Advice: The food supply is not expanded to meet a growing population. The population grows to meet an expanded food supply.

@Unsolicited Advice: i don't think ecoil was something people worried about in the 1920's popping up in their produce...... I would love some numbers between food born illnesses and deaths of today compared to the 1980s or anytime period in the last 50 years.

Am I the only one here who wants to actually SEE THIS MOVIE before praising or criticizing it?

Aw screw it.

The people who made this movie are naive commie hippie fuckheads!

-or-

This movie proves GWB personally took a huge shit in each and every batch of poptart frosting.

I'll come back and delete whichever opinion I end up disagreeing with using the edit feature.

@Featherstonehaugh: "Antiquated" family farmers might not be able to sustain the US today, but non-industrial farming methods have improved considerably.

This isn't just a hippie issue. It's a national security issue, an oil issue, a food-cost issue, an environmental issue, a farmer issue. (Also a "total failure to understand the economics of farming" issue on a grand scale, since half the people involved in agricultural economics appear to fail to understand that supply is influence BY NATURE and nature doesn't get your freaking memo about how much rain you want this year.) I'm on the board at my local county extension, and agribusiness hurts farmers. Even the big ones. "High-yield" GMO crops don't provide notably higher yields than modern farming methods with non-GMO crops, but they DO cost hella more and (typically) exhaust the soil faster. Agribusiness encourages practices we scientifically know are BAD or contraindicated, in the pursuit of short-term profit (wreck your soil there, Bob, and you ain't growin' nothin').

Agribusiness does a lot of exciting and important research, it's true, but their motive is not the good of farmers, the health of your food supply, the health of your soil, or the safety and long-term sustainability of your nation. Their goal is PROFIT for that company and for shareholders, and in pursuit of that goal they pursue a lot of strategies that are contrary to farmers' interests, our environmental interests, and our long-term national interests.

@dbshaw: I'd like to be with you on this, but how is corporate farming responsible for overpopulation? I would think the exploding birth rate in undeveloped countries, where corporate farming takes food out of hungry mouths and many people are subsistence farmers, is chiefly responsible.

@Unsolicited Advice: It's actually hard to imagine a BIGGER problem that has more effect on the average American -- in terms of food health and safety (including death from lifestyle diseases), in terms of wasted tax dollars, in terms of environmental impact, and in terms of long-term national security and economic sustainability -- than agricultural policy and practices in this country today.

@jaydez: That's how my students reacted to "Super Size Me"

These are heavy political times. When your trailer implies that 3 members of the previous administration are responsible for the evil your documentary attempts to expose, I think you undermine the gravity of your message and possibly sabotage your box office returns.

@Pibbs: If the US wasn't artificially lowering, via government subsidies, the prices of corn, wheat, etc. we export, poorer nation would be more likely to use their own land for agriculture. But third world farmers can't compete so the they end up as poor transients in urban areas and the farm land goes fallow. That leaves these poorer nations at risk of famine. Industrial agriculture causes more starvation than traditional farming and it is not sustainable over the long term.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Seconded. +2

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): No no this is completely on point. If we stopped importing Chinese products of any type we would open up a war in which we might not win.

The ethical problem becomes simpler if you say foreign policy is to not get involved and simply let what happens happens.

@AbsurdHero: People are made of food. When you were born you were tiny, now you're whatever size you are. Where did that mass come from? It comes from food. No population explosion is possible without the availability of food. Its basic biology, as well as basic physics.

First world farmers provide the fuel for third world population growth

science-fiction-sounding "breakthroughs" such as insecticide-resistant soybean seeds

If you're going to fear-monger, you should know what you're talking about first. Round-Up Ready soybeans are resistant to the herbicide Round-Up. Insecticides kill insects. This was in fact a huge breakthrough, not just because it means we have to do less plowing and spraying to get rid of weeds. Also because this trait can be packaged with other traits, such as insect resistance, so that you can see which plants got the genes inserted properly simply by spraying.

@takes_so_little: I don't think you need to see this movie to realize that while there are going to be some truths in there, it's mostly going to be fearmongering and blaming things on the ebil republicans.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Your comments are always among the most lucid and cogent on this whole site. I just want to say thanks. =)

It looks interesting but I feel like I've already seen this film. It was called The Future of Food. It's available on Hulu,
[www.hulu.com]

Great film.

@Chumas: that scene at the end where they're walking the new hire thru the killing floor & processing plant was tough to watch. i actually stopped eating McD ~6 mos. before i saw it, so it just reinforced my decision.

this weekend, i saw "death on a factory farm" (hbo documentary). i don't think i want to eat bacon anymore now - & that's pretty much like heroin to me. :(

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): Want to double heart McGee. Well said.

@takes_so_little:

Because he/she's right. By every conceivable empirical measure, human health and longevity have increased even while the EEEEEEEEEEEEVIL "processed" food had all that "crap thrown in it."