Food, Inc.

So what’s killing the planet this week? That’s right, it’s food: specifically the kind of mass-produced, factory-farmed, chemically treated and genetically modified junk that we all know is bad for us – but we secretly love. Inspired by co-producer Eric Schlosser’s bestselling 2002 polemic ‘Fast Food Nation’, this solidly constructed documentary aims to do for food production what ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ did for global warming: namely, to make audiences angry and politicans take note.

It’s a somewhat bitty, dissolute experience – you get the feeling any one of these skimmed-over stories could have sustained an entire documentary. But director Robert Kenner succeeds in constructing a powerful, convincingly nightmarish vision of America on the slide: a country where marketability trumps sustainability, where public health is sacrificed in favour of profit, where labour unions are crushed and animal rights are an irrelevance. In recent years, films like ‘The End of the Line’ have proved that movies are capable of provoking direct action: let’s hope ‘Food Inc’ can drum up the same fervour before we all succumb to the obesity epidemic.