Big-Business Agriculture on Film
added 06/08/09
Come to the Hopkins Center on the Dartmouth College campus on Saturday, October 3, 2009, at 7:30 p.m., and see the film about the reality of corporate agriculture. Food, Inc. is a 93-minute documentary that explores the hidden, high costs that exist within the cheapest food system in the world. Discussion follows with Dartmouth College and Upper Valley community leaders, including Co-op Education Director Rosemary Fifield.
Film Presentation and Discussion Special: Food, Inc.
Saturday, October 3, 7:30 p.m.
Spaulding Auditorium, The Hopkins Center
Tickets: General Public $8 | Dartmouth IDs $5
For tickets, call 603-646-2422
For information, call 603-646-2576
Though officially it may be a documentary, some say it’s more like a horror movie. Whatever it may be, Food, Inc. promises to lift the veil on corporate agriculture so that viewers can judge for themselves.
Hungry for Change?
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According to the film, these hidden costs behind the American food system include, among other things:
- skyrocketing adult and childhood obesity rates,
- lower nutritional quality of the food being produced,
- changes to our environment, and
- the devastating economic impacts that corporate agri-business has had on family farms and rural communities.
“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000,” says Michael Pollan in the film’s opening sequence. Pollan is an investigative journalist whose bestselling books, The Omnivores Dilemma and In Defense of Food, helped propel the realities of industrial agriculture to the national conscience.
With the help of Pollan, acclaimed film director Robert Kenner, and food journalist Eric Schlosser —bestselling author of Fast Food Nation—the documentary puts the industrialization of the American food system on center stage. “The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating,” says Schlosser in the film, “because if you knew, you might not want to eat it.”
Industry Response
According to the New York Times, the corporate food industry has not stood silent about the claims made in the film. “Each sector of the industry that’s named is doing its part to counter a lot of the misinformation in the movie,” Lisa Katic, a dietitian and consultant with an unnamed coalition of trade associations representing the food industry, told the Times. To read the full article and check out some of the websites and resources that have been set up to counter the film, click here.
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