My Food, Myself

FILM REVIEW:
Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread), Food, Inc., and We Feed the World

≡≡≡≡  my sources for this post appear at the end of the post.  ≡≡≡≡

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

In George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, the pigs, which have served as advocates for all the farm animals — striving to better their conditions and oppose the practices and world-view of the humans — gradually adopt that world-view and those practices, and begin to resemble their oppressors.

Animal Farm ends with a disturbing image: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I remember how reading those lines gave me a cold chill. I experienced the same feeling watching a documentary recently.

A man and a woman, clothed in white aprons, stand in the midst of a large, clean, shadowless industrial building. In the background and all around them are overhead tracks, on which empty hooks swing with the conveyor-belt motion of the tracks. The man and woman stand passively, not interacting though they face one another only a few feet apart beneath the tracks. Eventually, plucked chickens begin to appear on the hooks, far distant. The chickens swing closer and closer, until finally they reach the respective stations of the man and woman. Mechanically, the human workers raise their knives and hands, grasp each chicken as it swings by, and perform the necessary eviscerating or severing task on each, release it, and address the next.

Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread) offers this scene without commentary. It’s an Austrian film released late in 2005. Comprised solely of vignettes, it contains no scripted dialogue or voiceover, only images. (Rarely, people are heard talking in the background, but the words are either inaudible or unimportant.)

“The viewer outside looks from machine to man, and from man to machine, and from machine to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I mentioned to someone that I was impressed with this film and that it had caused me to re-think the food sold in our markets. She asked, “Was it really gross?” meaning, “Were the conditions disgusting in those processing plants?” I told her that part of the shock came from the images of clean, glossy industrial processing of food — not what you’d think of when you imagine food production.

Dehumanizing humans and de-animalizing animals

Unser Täglisch Brot powerfully shows how mechanization and corporatization in the creation and processing of our food affects both its producers and the food itself.

What is it to be human? Considering that around eight hours a day is given to our work, what is an acceptable quality of life during so large a part of our day? Who is really living?

Our system of creating and processing food dehumanizes us.

In the documentary, machines are filmed with people operating them. The people seem to be extensions of the machines, fitting into the machines, like parts. Unser Täglisch Brot is bookended by shots showing workers, anonymous in full protective suits, face masks, and boots, spraying down and sanitizing meat-processing plants: person in service to machine.

The animals move toward these stationary people — the people do not move. Even cows waiting to be milked are placed into tubular racks on a conveyor belt, moving toward a waiting person who cleans their teats and attaches the milking machine as the cows pass by.

One grotesque sequence shows the killing of cows for slaughter. Working alone, a man loads a cow into a circular chamber resembling an MRI machine. After pushing the cow in from the rear and closing the machine, the worker walks to the front of the machine. As the cow struggles, the worker shoots it in the forehead. Intstantly, the animal drops. The chamber begins rotating upside-down with the cow twitching inside. The worker circles again to the rear of the machine and pulls from an overhead track a piece of equipment that he loops around the inverted bovine’s rear legs. With the push of a button, the animal — not twitching now — is dragged from the chamber, is conveyed, suspended, head and forelegs dangling, out of sight down the overhead track. The worker has loaded the next animal into the chamber before the first is out of the video frame.

Perhaps the most chilling vignettes of all are those showing human beings during their breaks. Time after time, we see workers sitting alone, staring into space, not interacting. Even one scene filming eight workers together in a lunchroom reveals one talking nonstop, with the others silent, not engaged, not relating to one another, and only occasionally glancing at the incessant speaker. The passive, silent chewing of sandwiches and smoking of cigarettes underscores the notion that the workers’ physical needs are being met in the same way that the machines are lubricated and washed down: in order to sustain their functionality in the system.

In two brief sequences, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, the director of Unser Täglisch Brot, offers a contast to the dehumanizing view of mechanized food production. Two men who work together mining what looks like salt, and two men who harvest nuts together, are filmed during their lunch break, chatting and laughing. The natural settings — deep inside the earth, in a nut orchard — and the notion of teamwork — in each case, one worker is essential to the success of the other  — serve to mitigate the tendency of mechanized food production to reduce people to the level of cogs in a machine. In both the nut harvesting and the salt mining, machines are clearly necessary; but dehumanization does not follow as a necessary consequence.

Can animals be animals?

Not only does mechanization and corporatization of the food supply system dehumanize workers, it also de-animalizes the animals — and even “de-plants” the plants. In Unser Täglisch Brot, cows and pigs are fertilized by artificial insemination; they never contact animals of the opposite gender. Cows are fed by moving vehicles fitted out with chutes spraying feed into their pens. They don’t feed at troughs or bins, but scavenge on the floor among the excrement and bedding material for their food. Even the birthing process is de-animalized, with calves delivered by c-section.

One scene opens with a man in a white lab coat rolling a tall, gleaming enclosed rack into a brightly lit room neatly lined with such racks. The room looks like it houses a supercomputer or something similarly high-tech. Then the man opens the door of the rack and reveals drawer after drawer of baby chicks. Even knowing that I was watching a film about food production, this image startled me. The chicks, a stereotypical emblem of yellow cartoon cuteness, bear no relation to their environment. Presumably, research has determined the correct ratio of maximum efficiency to minimum “collateral damage” — disease or loss of product.

The “de-planting” of plants is shown in vignettes of vast fields, monocultures of grain, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, and tomatoes. In one affecting scene, acres of sunflowers nod in an artificial wind created by a crop-dusting airplane flying low overhead, an image that, in a vaguely unsettling way, mocks a natural existence out in the open. And there is footage of vegetables moving on conveyor belts to be processed by the human components of the factory, paralleling the treatment of animals in the animal-processing sequences.

EXPLAIN TO ME WHAT’S WRONG

“What the system of intensive production accomplishes is to produce a lot of food on a small amount of land at a very affordable price. Somebody explain to me what’s wrong with that.” So says Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council in Food, Inc., an American documentary.

Unser Täglisch Brot can help enlighten Mr. Lobb — what’s wrong, for starters, is that the intensive production dehumanizes people and de-animalizes animals. Two other recent documentaries — Food, Inc. and We Feed the World — offer their own views on exactly what’s wrong.

None of your business

In Food, Inc., director Robert Kenner frames the issue as a matter of corporate disclosure and free speech: “This isn’t just about what we’re eating. This is about what we’re allowed to say. What we’re allowed to know.” Kenner asks, “What rights do human beings have, regarding their food supply?”

Food, Inc. contends that the food industry in the United States is dominated by a disproportionately small number of corporate giants, which control the chain of food creation and processing at all levels — from the smallest farmer to the very legislators who regulate the industry.

Citing statistics — for example, four beef packers control 80% of the U.S. beef market — and tracing lines of influence — for example, USDA, FDA, EPA officials in the Clinton and the G. W. Bush administrations came from Monsanto and other food-producing corporations or lobbying groups — the film catalogues a list of evils created by a system run by arrogant power brokers:

—≡—  Encouragement of illegal immigrant labor
—≡—  Human health problems
—≡—  Animal health problems
—≡—  Financial dependency of farmers
—≡—  Environmental damage
—≡—  Poor food quality

Food, Inc. connects the dots between corporate food production, a diseased food supply, and diabetes; and explains why the system promotes malnutrition-related health problems among the poor. Each item in the list above receives detailed treatment in the documentary; one example here will suffice as an example of how Food, Inc. develops its argument:

Corn, a crop heavily subsidized by the government and an ingredient in an overwhelming majority of food and non-food products, is also used as feed for all kinds of livestock, even farmed fish. Cows, whose digestive systems are not adapted to corn for feed, develop E. coli 0157:H7, the organism that periodically crops up in our food supply — it has been found not only in hamburgers and tacos, but also raw spinach and Nestlé cookie dough. When the cows’ natural diet is restored, the organism vanishes.

The corporate giants go to extreme lengths in their efforts to muzzle anyone who threatens to divulge the truth about the flaws in the system. Food, Inc. is full of examples:

—≡—  Legislators protect the big players. For example, Colorado has a “veggie libel law”: you can go to prison for criticizing a food company.

—≡—  Monsanto has brought lawsuits against farmers who have had patented Monsanto soybeans blow into their fields from those of neighboring farmers. When farmers who don’t sow Monsanto beans hire seed cleaners — independent small businesses that clean harvested seed for planting the next season — Monsanto sues them, too, claiming that their very business “induces” patent infringment because it encourages the saving of seed — even if it is not Monsanto seed that is being cleaned.

—≡—  Only deep pockets can fight the big players and win. In a well-publicized trial, Texas cattlemen sued Oprah Winfrey after she made a comment about mad cow disease on her talk show. She successfully defended her right to free speech, but only after spending a million dollars in legal fees. The small farmers and seed cleaners who are sued by Monsanto typically settle out of court in an effort to avoid being driven bankrupt by legal fees — thus adding to the legal precedents that suggest that Monsanto’s claims are justified, when in reality all they suggest is that Monsanto has a larger legal fund to intimidate the small players with.

—≡—  Tyson, a giant in the poultry industry, intimidates its growers. Although they are not owned by Tyson, these growers are required to sign a contract preventing them from showing anyone — on camera or off — the inside of a henhouse that is used for housing chickens destined for Tyson. Breaking this gag rule brings immediate termination of the contract.

—≡—  The big players are fostering a dependency that is difficult if not impossible to break free of. Once you sign on the dotted line, there is no going back. As Food, Inc. points out, “A typical grower with two chicken houses has borrowed over $500,000, and earns about $18,000 a year.” How does this happen? Tyson and Perdue, the other poultry giant, require specific modifications to farmers’ henhouses — such as boarding up all windows so that the poultry will be raised in a completely artificially lighted environment. These alterations cost money, which must be spent before the farmer can begin raising the poultry that will eventually pay the loans back.

Are all corporate giants evil?

Food, Inc. offers one possible model that suggests there may be hope, that consumer input may affect the nature of the food creation and processing system.

Stonyfield Farms, a company that met with great success providing organic dairy products, has entered the realm of the big players. When Stonyfield began to claim a significant market share, it was purchased by international giant Groupe Danone. As part of the deal, Stonyfield’s founder, Gary Hirshberg, remained the CEO of Stonyfield, and he still runs the company. He says that he intended to become a big player in the food-processing system: “I realized we need to not be David up against Goliath. We need to be Goliath.”

Hirshberg wisely realized that, in this case, David stands little chance prevailing against Goliath. But has he sold out to a system that promotes illegal immigrant labor, induces human and animal health problems, creates financial dependency in its suppliers, wreaks environmental damage, and results in poor food quality?

At least on the topic of environmental impact, Hirshberg believes he is holding up a standard: “We wanted to prove that business could be part of the solution to the globe’s environmental problems, and at the same time, we had to prove that we could be highly profitable.” He claims that every time WalMart places a large order for Stonyfield yogurt, there is a corresponding reduction in the use of pesticides and other environmentally harmful practices. Hirshberg has a point: WalMart would not carry Stonyfield yogurt if there weren’t a consumer demand for it; and thus the consumers are, finally, allowed the opportunity to “vote with their wallets” and choose between two or more distinctly different offerings.

We feed the rich

Perhaps you are thinking that Unser Täglisch Brot is a parochial portrait of faults in the Austrian system of food production. You are thinking, perhaps, that Food, Inc. is an exposé of the faults in the American system.

But it would be a mistake to think locally. A second Austrian documentary, released in 2005, the same year as Unser Täglisch Brot, paints a global picture of what is wrong with the system of intensive production. We Feed the World reveals that the faults affect the food industries in countries as diverse as Austria, France, Spain, Senegal, Romania, and Brazil.

In this film, director Erwin Wagenhofer examines the relationship between wealth and poverty, food and hunger, and shows how methods of food production are not actually helping to feed the world. The opening and closing shots — ears of corn burning in red embers — express the literal truth of abundant food being wasted, and the metaphorical truth of human lives also tossed aside, by the corporatized system of food production.

—≡—  Austria: Bread that is no more than two days old is considered unfit for sale. Truckloads of it  — two million kilos a year — are thrown away every day. A truck driver remarks, “. . . even though I’ve been in the business more than ten years now and I always drive the same route, I still see old people stopping and staring, because they just can’t believe what we’re doing.” The old people, having lived through times of want, cannot grasp the decision to destroy food unnecessarily when people are going hungry every day.

—≡—  France: Small fishing business operators know what they’re doing. They read the water, the weather, and know where the fish will be. The European Union has decreed the keeping of logbooks to record such statistics, and industrial trawlers are using the data to conduct large-scale fishing. Sounds great, doesn’t it — bigger fishing operations equals more fish, more efficiency, more people fed. But two problems result from this: the trawlers cost so much to run that they must operate year-round, not seasonally, and overharvest the fish stocks; and they stay out longer and store more fish than the small fishing operators, so their fish, when they do arrive at the market, are stale and flavorless.

—≡—  Spain and Senegal: Spain has done a wonderful job establishing highly controlled greenhouses, producing a lot of tomatoes (among other things) and creating lots of new local jobs. Two problems: First, the tomatoes have no flavor (echoing the complaint in Food, Inc. that mass-produced tomatoes are “notional” tomatoes, “the idea of a tomato”). Second, in Dakar, Senegal, where the environment is great for growing vegetables, the farmers don’t have the resources to compete with the efficiency of Spanish tomato growers. The imported European vegetables are actally less expensive than their own locally grown produce, so the local farmers aren’t getting the business. They can’t sustain a living, so they take their skills and migrate (illegally) to work in the shantytowns that spring up around the big Spanish greenhouses. Local jobs — and illegal immigration, too — increase with corporatized agriculture. Food, Inc. documents the same thing happening with corn grown in the U.S., chickens produced by Perdue, and pigs produced by Smithfield. In Mexico, these food products can be purchased more cheaply than local products, resulting in loss of income for the local workers, who seek income by working illegally for their competitors in the United States. Food, Inc. points out that Perdue and Smithfield actually recruit Mexicans and advertise for their labor, yet it is the illegal immigrants themselves who find themselves in legal hot water, not the companies that have created their poverty and have exploited the cheap labor that grows from that poverty.

—≡—  Romania: Pioneer Romania, a corporation owned by the American giant DuPont, behaves in Romania much as Monsanto does in the U.S. Pioneer is supported by the Romanian government, giving subsidies to farmers so that they will choose its patented, genetically modified eggplant seed. The seeds are hybrids, which can’t be harvested and used in the next year’s planting — and thus the cycle of farmer dependency on the corporate giant begins. When the state withdraws its subsidy — which, inevitably, it does — the farmers are hobbled and cannot sever the ties with the corporate food producer.

—≡—  Brazil: The soil in Brazil is just no good for growing soybeans — all of the necessary nutrients must be added from the outside — yet massive acres of rainforest are cleared continually in order to grow soybeans. Worse, these soybeans are grown for export to Europe, China, and Japan. In Europe, ninety percent of this soy feeds not people, but livestock. We Feed the World spends some time showing footage of a family suffering from starvation in Brazil; they could use the soybeans, or some other more suitable crop, to sustain their lives and health. The irony of millions of acres of food going to livestock in Europe when people living adjacent to the fields are dying of starvation is pathetic and rich.

—≡—  Austria: Peter Brabek, CEO of Nestlé, patiently instructs his interviewer in the commercial value of drinking water: “Water is of course the most important raw material we have today in the world. It’s a question of whether we should privatise the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter. The one opinion, which I think is extreme, is represented by the NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right. That means that as a human being you should have a right to water. That’s an extreme solution. And the other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any foodstuff it should have a market value. Personally I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff value so that we’re all aware that it has its price, and then that one should take specific measures for the part of the population that has no access to this water, and there are many different possibilities there.”

“Free Trade” is not free

When big corporations control the entire system of food production — from the people who grow the food to the politicians who write legislation regulating the industry and ostensibly protecting citizens from corporate abuses of the system — there is no such thing as a free market. As Jean Ziegler, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, points out in We Feed the World, “Free trade has nothing to do with freedom, that’s an enormous lie. It’s the freedom of the predatory animal in the jungle when Nestlé, for example, takes on an African farmers’ syndicate. That’s like Mike Tyson going into the ring against an undernourished Bengali.”

Just give me the money

Undoubtedly, large corporations in any commercial sector provide abundant jobs and affect the standard of living for many, many people, either directly or indirectly. The UN’s Jean Ziegler notes that Nestlé is “the largest food product corporation in the world, with almost 300,000 employees, active on five continents, controlling over 8,000 brands.” Take the number of human beings affected by Nestlé and multiply it by the number of large food-producing giants, and the you’re looking at a powerful force in the lives of millions.

But if you look behind the public face of the corporations, which desire to portray themselves as benign employers, you will find a hand outstretched, palm up — not to help, but to receive money. It is not surprising that Tyson, Monsanto, Smithfield, and Perdue all declined to be interviewed for Food, Inc. — when the veil comes off, when the motive behind the activity is revealed, human workers disappear and the message becomes, “Just give me the money.”

MY FOOD, MYSELF

I think that I am not the only one to have an uneasy relationship with my food.

At different times, I’ve been a vegetarian (on the grounds of not desiring to exploit animals), a non-veal-eater (on the grounds of not wanting to promote inhumane treatment of one particular animal), and an avoider of processed foods (on the grounds of wanting to consume food as close to nature as possible).

My friend H———— raises some animals for her family’s consumption. Among the beef, goats, chickens, and other livestock she keeps, she has the most difficulty when it comes to killing the rabbits. “I look up to God and say a prayer thanking Him for our food,” she says. “I cry every time.”

I think that both H———— and I regard animals as a part of God’s creation, and human beings, by virtue of our sheer ability to arrange and control our environment, as their stewards. Human beings, we feel, have a trust to maintain. If we have been created carnivores, then we should exercise our natural desire for meat in a responsible way.

But the way food has come to be produced in this world bothers me and, evidently, others as well. Three fairly recent films — Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread), Food, Inc., and We Feed the World — examine and criticize the global corporatization and industrialization of food production.

The “natural,” old-fashioned method of containing the food cycle all in one place — for example, calves born on a farm are raised in a field there, eat grass, fertilize the field with their manure, are slaughtered and cut up into beef parcels onsite, and sold onsite or nearby — has been replaced by the big food corporations with a system that compartmentalizes each phase in the cycle, supposedly for the economies of scale and efficiency of mass-production.

According to Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, who was interviewed for Food, Inc., the economies are false ones. The hidden costs — producing and harvesting the feed for the calves, transporting their feed to the pens in which they are housed, and carting away their manure — are all costs that simply do not exist in the self-contained method.

There are other, less direct “costs,” too. Salatin points out that the price of the industrialized food commodity can swing widely based on factors related to industrialization. For example, the production of a single steer consumes 75 gallons of oil; if petroleum prices rise, then the cost of beef will rise as well.

The human costs of corporatized, industrial food production are also significant. The films discussed in this blog describe health problems in both workers who produce food and people who consume it; poverty and malnutrition resulting both from the subsidies of nutritionally poor food options as well as the encouragement of cheap or illegal labor; and a loss of the sense that one’s work has meaning among employees of the big food producers.

GIVE US MEANING, GIVE US FOOD TO CARE FOR

Nestlé’s Peter Brabek was a fool to allow himself to be interviewed at length for We Feed the World. After extolling the power of Nestlé to improve the lives of so many people — his company employs so many and they in turn are responsible for so many more — a sort of force for good — Brabek leads his interviewer down the gleaming, utterly unpopulated corridors of Nestlé’s headquarters on Lake Geneva. Spotting a TV monitor showing a mechanized Japanese factory, Brabek pauses to admire the video, pointing it out to his interviewer. His voice is full of admiration: “The Japanese. You can see how modern these facilities are; highly robatised, almost no people.”

Almost no people. That, clearly, is the dream of big food producers. To be able to produce food without employees would indeed be wonderful. Just give me the money. People are expendable in the manufacturing end as well as in the receiving end of the system.

Perhaps we should embrace Brabek’s dream. If his methods of food production result in persons whose work strips their lives of a sense of meaning, then perhaps people ought to be removed entirely from that equation.

But to do that would be to give the stewardship of animals and plants to the corporate giants, and that would be a sin.

We need to take back the right to have meaning in our lives and in our care for the other creatures on this earth.

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What do you think? Feel free to post your comments below.

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S O U R C E S :

We Feed the World —≡—  Erwin Wagenhofer, director —≡—  Austria —≡—  released September 10, 2005 at the Toronto International Film Festival —≡—  Awards: 2006, Best Documentary (Guild of German Art House Cinemas); 2006, Amnesty International Award (Motovun Film Festival); 2006, FIPRESCI Prize (Motovun Film Festival); Nominated, 2009, Sundance Film Festival (nominated for Grand Jury Prize).

Unser Täglisch Brot (Our Daily Bread) —≡—  Nikolaus Geyrhalter, director —≡—  Austria —≡—  released November 28, 2005 at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival —≡—  Awards: 2005, Special Jury Award (Amsterdam International Documentary Film Festival); 2008, Adolf Grimme Award (Adolf Grimme Awards, Germany); Nominated, Best Documentary Award (European Film Awards).

Food, Inc. —≡—  Robert Kenner, director —≡—  United States —≡—  released September 7, 2008 at the Toronto International Film Festival —≡—  Awards: Nominated for the 2020 Academy Award, Documentary Feature category (15 nominations).

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Tags: corporate food, DuPont, Food, Food Inc., food industry, food production, Genesis 2:15-20, Monsanto, Nestle, Our Daily Bread, Perdue, Pioneer, Polyface Farms, Smithfield, stewardship, Stonyfield Farms, Tyson, Unser Taglisch Brot, We Feed the World

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