He often pays the bills doing commercials. So Robert Kenner, director of Food, Inc., knew how to use snappy advertising graphics - the kind usually employed by giant food companies - to pull audiences into his scathingly enjoyable expose of Big Agra. Kenner placed the movie's opening credits on supermarket shelves, where typical logos present images from America's pastoral past to hawk products made on assembly lines. It's a sprightly, clever way for Kenner to announce, as he puts it, "It's OK to laugh: I want you to be entertained."
Kenner prides himself on being an open-minded documentary maker. On the phone from his Los Angeles office, he confesses, "I always learn more from people whose opinions I don't share." He didn't get that opportunity on Food, Inc. None of the food and chemical behemoths he contacted during filming responded to requests for interviews. But if business holds strong for this scrappy yet elegant documentary, David might again defeat Goliath.
Kenner knew he was entering an "Orwellian world" when he heard lawmakers and lobbyists agree that labeling cloned meat "cloned" would be "too confusing" for consumers. "The lack of transparency is the most frightening thing about this world," says Kenner. "We spend less of our paycheck on food than at any time in history. Unfortunately, a lot of this inexpensive food comes at a very high unseen cost. You don't see what you're really paying for at the checkout counter." His film lays out the actual costs in medical bills, pollution, energy consumption, and human and animal exploitation.
The author of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, one of Food, Inc.'s producers, shares his wisdom on camera. So does Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Kenner says they both wrote "great books," but this showman-like director never mistook their readership for his potential audience. "I wanted to make a film for the unconverted." To do so required characters who could put flesh and blood on the movie's issues.
That's where Carole Morison came in. Long before Food, Inc. she had been investigating the use of arsenic and antibiotics in chicken feed and its effect on workers and the community at large. For two decades, she and her husband had been contract growers for Perdue Farms at a modest spread in Pocomoke City. She stepped up to Kenner's challenge when no other chicken farmers would open their barns to his camera. Morison said Monday that she didn't hesitate for a second. "It was time."
