Food, Inc.: A Participant Guide

The result is a stunning, mind-expanding movie that lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that's been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As Kenner shows, our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers, and our natural environment.

As a result of this truly revolutionary reshaping of the national food supply—caused by business and political trends of just the last forty years—we now have bigger-breasted chickens, the "perfect" pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, and even tomatoes that won't go bad during a long trip from the fields to the supermarket shelf. But we also have new, resistant strains of E. coli, the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually.

We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children, and epidemic levels of diabetes and other diet-related illnesses. We have a vast and growing population of farm workers and food processing employees who are underpaid, lack health insurance, and in some cases labor in virtual slavery. We have ugly, foul-smelling factory farms that pollute the air and water while producing foods of dubious safety and nutritional value. We have secretive corporations that increasingly control not just our food supply but the very genetic makeup of the plants that sustain life on Earth. And we have a worldwide economic system that impoverishes farmers in the developing world even as it drives up food prices for the poorest of the poor.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), along with forward-thinking entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farm's Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising and often shocking truths—about what we eat and how it's produced, but also about who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Because Food, Inc. deals with a topic of such importance, complexity, and inherent interest, it's a perfect opportunity to launch the series of film-to-page companion books whose first offspring you now hold in your hand. The American food production system and its impact on our health, our economy, our natural environment, and even our freedoms as a people is a theme with vast ramifications. Understanding it requires drawing a host of connections that no single movie could hope to trace. Hence this book, which is designed to help you take your knowledge about today's food crisis—and your ability to help find solutions—to the next level.

In his chapter on the making of Food, Inc., director Robby Kenner describes the personal journey of discovery he experienced in researching and creating the film. For me, bringing together the contents of this book has been an equally eye-opening journey.

One extraordinary stage in that journey took place over Labor Day weekend in 2008, when my wife Mary-Jo and I attended the Slow Food Nation conference in San Francisco—the first national gathering of Slow Food USA, the American branch of an international organization founded by the Italian cultural critic Carlo Petrini.

Slow Food's original intention was, as the name implies, to combat the spread of American-style fast food and to defend more traditional forms of agriculture and food preparation. It has spread to the United States (as well as around the world) and has now become a popular movement that strives to address and link an array of economic, cultural, and political issues related to the production, sale, and use of food.

After spending four days joining some 85,000 participants in sampling many of the activities offered—including food tastings and sales, panel discussions, film screenings, educational exhibits, and (of course) some amazing dinners—I came away convinced I'd witnessed one stage in the emergence of a new social, political, and economic movement.

The people and organizations who attended the conference came from many varied backgrounds and brought a wide range of interests and values to the table. Some were food lovers for whom the pleasure of fresh, local, well-prepared farm products is the chief motivating factor. Others were economists focused on issues like global hunger and the exploitation of farm workers. And still others were scientists and activists concerned with nutrition, food safety, pollution, and global climate change. Several of the distinguished experts and brilliant writers who would ultimately contribute to this book, from Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to Marion Nestle, were in attendance.

The San Francisco gathering convinced me that something big is happening in America today, represented not just by the tens of thousands of people who attended the conference but also by millions of other people around the country who are engaged in similar activities: shopping at organic food stores, at local farmers' markets, or through community-supported agriculture programs (CSAs); ordering fair-trade coffee when they get their morning caffeine fix; asking their kids' schools to get junk food out of the cafeterias; planting community gardens; and writing their representatives to call for changes in farm subsidies, better regulation of meat production, and clearer food labeling standards.

Thanks to concerned Americans such as these, food-related issues—hunger, childhood obesity, rising food prices, water shortages, soil depletion, and many others—are finally achieving a critical mass of attention from the media and the general public. And President Barack Obama has indicated his sympathy for many of the goals of the movement—although, of course, translating that sympathy into concrete reforms against the wishes of a deeply entrenched power base that supports and profits from the current system of industrialized food production will be enormously challenging.

Events such as the release of Food, Inc. can play an important catalytic role by bringing together thousands of people and getting them to draw the lines connecting seemingly unrelated economic, political, and social issues. We're hoping the book in your hand will also play a significant supporting role in that consciousness-raising process.

The book is divided into three sections. Part I focuses on the film itself and includes director Robby Kenner's personal account of the making of Food, Inc. and an interview with co-producer Eric Schlosser, who puts the movie in the broader social context of today's burgeoning food-reform movement.

Part II takes a closer look at many of the issues raised by the movie, providing those who've seen the film (and those who haven't) with much more information about the scientific, economic, political, social, and personal conflicts underpinning the current battle for control of America's food supply. Some of the topics discussed in Part II—like the effort by companies such as Monsanto to take control of the genetic basis of our food supply, analyzed by veteran science journalist Peter Pringle, or the appalling conditions suffered by agricultural workers, described by United Farm Workers' (UFW) leader Arturo Rodriguez—will be familiar from Food, Inc. Others—like the impact of farming on global climate change, discussed by Anna Lappé, or the effects of the American food system on poor people around the world, dissected by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus—are touched on only briefly, or not at all, in the movie. Taken together, the chapters in this part of the book should deepen your appreciation for the importance of the issues treated in the film and the complexities of their interrelationships.

In Part III, we offer some solutions—real-world steps that you can take as a consumer and a citizen to promote improvements in the ways we produce, distribute, and eat food. The advice in this section ranges from the inspirational, as offered up by writer Michael Pollan and ecoagricultural firebrand Joel Salatin; to the intensely practical, including, for example, simple ways to separate food facts from food myths when planning your own family's diet, provided by nutrition expert Marion Nestle; and some ideas on how you can launch a campaign to improve the food served in your neighborhood schools from the citizen-activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Interspersed throughout the book, among the twelve full-length chapters provided by our distinguished experts, we've included shorter excerpts under the heading of "Another Take." These offer different perspectives or useful ideas from some of the leading organizations working to improve our ways of producing and eating food, ranging from the Humane Society of the United States and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Sustainable Table and Food & Water Watch.

Finally, the book concludes with a list of many more resources you can turn to for more information, ideas, and inspiration. They include some of the best books in the field as well as contact information for organizations that are at the forefront of the change effort and URLs for websites that are filled with useful facts related to every major food issue.

One important note: although all of the distinguished individuals and organizations that contributed to this book share a concern about the problems with our industrialized food system and a desire to reform it, they don't always agree on specific details or policy prescriptions. So the appearance of a particular writer or group in these pages shouldn't be construed as an endorsement of every opinion presented elsewhere in the book. Among other things, this book reflects some of the lively ongoing debates among the "food community" about the best directions for the future—debates that, we believe, embody the best American traditions and the hope for a better tomorrow shaped by the contributions of all of us.

Filmmaker Robby Kenner, his colleagues at Participant Media, their publishing partners at PublicAffairs, and all the gifted writers and researchers who helped create the contents of this volume surely join me in hoping that this book, and the movie that inspired it, will become simply the beginning—not the end—of your engagement in the global initiative to create a healthier, more sustainable food supply system for all the peoples of the world.