FOOD FOR THOUGHT IN “FOOD INC.”

There are more than the usual horror stories about what goes on your dinner table that are contained in this biting documentary by Robert Kenner, now playing at the Loft Cinema.

The thorough filmmaker also takes time to explain that our supermarkets are filled with so many mass-produced manufactured food products because consumers keep demanding lower prices.

So do the fast food corporations which, the film implies, were the catalyst for first thinking of cows as walking lumps of chemical substances that could be re-imagined as millions (literally) of identical hamburgers designed by chemical engineers and processed by vast assembly line machines. You think it’s a coincidence all those Big Macs look alike?

This factory assembly line approach to developing, packaging and distributing food has removed the real food from what is actually being consumed. Some unpleasant unintended consequences are the result as the meat of sick chickens, cows and pigs are processed right alongside the healthy ones on huge conveyor belt systems with no interest in separating the good from the bad.

Few of the giant agribusiness corporations studied by Kenner would talk to him, but the gist of the arguments for the few spokesmen who step forward is that consumers get cheaper food and lots of it. But pumping out more cheap food faster and cheaper means more people have to buy and eat all that food.

Just this week, in the July 20 edition of The New Yorker, is an article about the fattening of America. Over the last 20 years, obesity in this country has reached epidemic proportions. This timing coincides with the rise of the fast food industry, which fills television time with commercials encouraging viewers to keep eating more and more. And more. It is a bit disingenuous to keep blaming the consumer, when extremely sophisticated marketing techniques and psychological studies are employed to make these commercials so intensely seductive.

For fast food, especially, the ads are aimed at the overworked and stressed out lower middle class families whose parents spend so much time working they don’t have any time left to prepare a proper meal for their children. Kenner points out that fast food may be cheap, but it isn’t nutritious.

Then in the supermarket, even the artificially ripened vegetables are more expensive than a co-called “meal” of hamburger and fries. Kenner also points out that among children born since the year 2000, rates of obesity and diabetes are extremely high.

But the saddest part is there apparently are no villains in this story. Americans have depended on the laws of the market place to provide the incentives for healthy food to fuel an industrious population competing in a world economy.

Clearly, and disastrously, that hasn’t happened. Any parents who care about their children’s’ future must see “Food Inc.” Then buy the DVD. Then watch it every week just before making that big trip to the supermarket.