Today more people are questioning where their food comes from than ever before. Or at least, they’re being told they should.

Director Robert Kenner’s 2008 documentary Food, Inc. aims to shake the apathetic from their happy meals and give them a cold dose of the reality behind our current food systems.

Do not go into Food, Inc. expecting a Michael Moore-type attack on food production systems in the United States. Kenner has crafted a mature and effective documentary without resorting to unnecessary manipulation.

Images of a beautiful, clean supermarket stocked with brightly-coloured packages are juxtaposed with endless, filthy, depressing fields of cattle who are little more than walking steaks.

Kenner wonderfully balances information, emotion and entertainment. He moves back and forth from experts like Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma – talking about the questionable (read: downright evil) practices of companies like Monsanto and Tyson Chicken – to the story of a mother’s fight against a food company after her two-year-old son ate one of their tainted burgers and died 12 days later.

Food, Inc. does not resort to needless visual tricks to get its message across. Everything is straightforward and easy to understand. This is a film that everyone can learn from.

It shows a system that has been built solely on efficiency and profit, and how that has caused disastrous consequences for workers, animals and the environment.

Food, Inc. is not an objective documentary; it is an essay film made to inform.

It might be preaching to the choir. But hopefully a few stray sentences will reach the pedestrians passing by the church doors on the street.

Published in Volume 64, Number 3 of The Uniter (September 17, 2009)