So, this is one of those horrifying/frustrating movies, with lots of little different segments that I think differ in effectiveness. It’s also scattershot enough that it ends up contradicting itself in a number of ways. So anyway, the parts:

  1. The part where they show chickens being grown and harvested? V. effective. I mean, I’ve read that stuff before, but seeing babby chicks being pulled out of hatching drawers and thrown onto a literal conveyer belt as bored workers pluck them off and tag them is genuinely awful.

  2. The part where they talk about crop yields, which is much less effective. Okay, yes, corn is ten times more productive now than it was. I can see how that drives some harmful behaviors, but it’s hard for me to imagine that things would really be better for everyone if corn were still extremely expensive and we had to dedicate more acres to farming to feed people.

  3. A section about food safety, which mostly just pissed me off, because the sob story lady in this section is engaging in obnoxious special pleading — she doesn’t like most regulation, but this one has personal significance to her, so she does.

  4. A section about meat processing plants, which is horrifying (the ammonia!) but also made me feel bad for the people there, who were clearly proud about their work and excited to show it to a movie crew, and then got cast as villains with spooky music over the footage.

  5. A thing about grocery shopping, where it was sad to see a poor family tell their daughter she couldn’t get pears and had to get candy instead because it was cheaper, when the family already has multiple diabetics in it. SO SAD.

  6. The part where they pretend to find a solution by having hippie farmers talk about how small organic local farms with grass-fed cows are the solution, which I find basically 0% convincing for anyone who is not a rich California yuppie. ALSO, this section points up the limits of disgust as a policy guide, because the hippie farmer slaughtering his chickens in a natural and organic way? Still pretty damn horrible. And yet, it’s not like I’m going to become a vegan or something, right?

  7. The part where they show a hog-killing plant and talk about bad labor conditions. Which, okay, right, nobody likes bad labor conditions, and I get the way this all ties together into a liberal trifecta, but I feel like this is a fundamentally different issue. Unions and labor regulations can help these dudes out (though obvs that is nearly impossible in modernity), but will not help nutrition or the disturbing artificiality of food.

  8. The part where they talk about organic agribusiness. This is actually one of the more interesting parts, because it’s a combination of total fucking hippies (the ones who say, to the Wal-Mart buyer, that they’ve never been to Wal-Mart, need punched) and cold hard business. I was a bit disappointed, though, because I know Pollan is critical of Big Organic, and this section was effectively total propaganda that didn’t attempt to lay out any criticisms and just was like, “Look, it’s a fuck of a lot better than the realistic alternatives.” Which I tend to agree with, but hey.

  9. The part about plant patents, which makes me hate genetic patents, but I don’t really take a whole lot of convincing to hate patents. But again, this seems off-point to the larger goals here. If Monsanto made their genetically modified soybeans open-source, would that make agriculture sustainable/nutritious/etc? No, it’d make it cheaper for farmers to raise and sell soybeans, which works against the “it’s too cheap to make soybeans!” point of earlier.

  10. The part about how politically powerful the big agribusiness companies are, and how they abuse the legal system, which pisses me off extremely and makes me want to break heads. The fundamental broken-ness of the legal system in cases of asymmetrical resources (aka, they can’t win their case, but they can make you spend more money than you can afford) is a major social problem, I think.

  11. A thing about oil, blah blah petroleumcakes. This is another one of those “aren’t you contradicting yourself?” things, where they’re talking less about global warming and mostly about how oil shocks drive up food prices and that causes food shortages. But weren’t they arguing against cheap food earlier? So anyway, if you’ve been reading Pollan and Schlosser (both of whom appear in this movie), nothing you learn here will be new to you, but it’s a reasonably good summation of the whole morass of issues, so if you haven’t read all that other stuff, you should probably watch it.