Food (Inc.) for thought

You might want to think about eating before you see “Food, Inc.” You sure aren’t going to want to eat after you see it.

If an advocacy documentary is judged by how much it makes you agree with its point of view, “Food, Inc.” is one of the best documentaries in years. The film wants to scare you into action, and it sure scares you.

The subject is food, and how it is increasingly unhealthy for us. It doesn’t just cite statistics, it takes us inside chicken coops where genetically manipulated, oversized chickens lie dead on the floor, and (via hidden camera) slaughterhouses that are, the film persuasively argues, petri dishes for e. coli.

And then it goes a step farther and introduces us to a nice woman from Colorado who has become a food-safety advocate. She makes the rounds in Washington, talking to sympathetic Congressmen and showing them a picture of her cute little son. He ate a tainted hamburger and was dead within days, she explains.

“Food, Inc.” is the “The Jungle” of the 21^st century, with the same kind of impact. It will have you looking at your food in a whole new light, examining its labels (and wondering what has been left out) and quite possibly avoiding the products of certain companies.

A lot of this film’s revelations have already come out in the news and other reviews, but one that has not been widely broadcast is perhaps the most shocking one. The giant chemical company Monsanto makes the weed killer Roundup, and also engineered a strain of soy bean that is resistant to Roundup -- it can be safely planted where Roundup is sprayed. But because Monsanto created the gene, it owns the intellectual property rights to the seeds. This means that farmers who try to save their seeds from one year to the next -- as they have been doing since mankind has been farming -- find themselves sued by Monsanto for intellectual property theft. Fighting the company in the courts has been prohibitively expensive for most farmers who have tried it.

The right of a company to claim a gene as its property -- in essence, to get a patent on a life form -- was decided by the Supreme Court. The justice who wrote the decision, Clarence Thomas, was for two years a corporate attorney for Monsanto, in its pesticide and agriculture division.

The movie’s central thesis is that the advent of fast food has resulted in unprecedented consolidation in the agriculture business, turning it into more of an industry than ever before. To feed America and the world’s fast food habit, giant agricultural corporations have been engineering ways to make food products bigger, faster, fattier, cheaper. As a result of these efficiencies, the quality of food has declined and the likelihood of disease has increased.

And through government subsidies, corn has become less expensive to sell than to grow. Because it is so cheap, corn is being used for everything from ketchup and peanut butter (in the form of high fructose corn syrup) to feed for cows and pigs -- and now even farm-raised fish are being taught to eat corn.

“Food, Inc.” is one shock after another, presented in what seems to be a fair and evenhanded way. It is almost entirely one-sided, though, although it is through no fault of the filmmakers. Offered the chance to respond to the charges made against them, one large company after another declined to be interviewed for the movie.

Considering the fascinating and horrifying case that is made against them, you can’t really blame them.