When Robert Kenner first suggested to Eric Schlosser that they make a movie version of his book Fast Food Nation, it was in a time before the word locavore, before people fetishized their local famrer's markets, before Michelle Obama planted an organic garden on the White House lawn. It was a time, basically, before anyone cared.
But in the intervening years Schlosser and Kenner have watched the world awaken to the problems of the industrial food system, and the notion that there's a lot in our food that no human was ever really meant to eat. "It's really a few corporations basically seling us unsustainable food. It's based on gasoline, the topsoil, polluting the earth. And it's a system that can't continue."
In Food Inc., Kenner, along with Schlosser and The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan and other experts, lays out the origins of our flawed industrial food system, and how a simple grain-- corn-- sent the American way of eating on a destructive path. From meat tainted with e. coli to obesity to pollution, any number of modern problems are linked to the flawed way in which food is treated as a manufactured product, rather than a natural resource.
I talked to Kenner about his inspiration for making the film and expanding it beyond Schlosser's examination of fast food, and also what surprised him as he investigated the subject further. Food Inc. comes out in limited theaters this Friday.
Below: Two Clips from Food, Inc.
