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CREATED:20100531T055300Z
DESCRIPTION:\nFilm evenings begin with optional potluck refreshments and social hour at 
  6:30 pm,\nfollowed by the film at  7:30 pm, followed by a discussion after 
 the film.\n\nFood, Inc.\nby Robert Kenner\n\nThis documentary about food is 
 one of the scariest films of last year.  It lifts the veil on our 
 nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that 
 has been hidden from the American consumer.  And nothing says horror like 
 one of those tubs of artificially buttered, in-organic popcorn at the 
 concession stand.  The film is an informative, infuriating, unappetizing 
 education about the Big Business of feeding, or, politically speaking, 
 force-feeding, Americans all the fast food that multinational corporate 
 money can buy.  It’s is a horror movie for the socially conscious, the 
 nutritionally curious, and the hungry.  It has a cheery palette but marches 
 straight into the dark side of cutthroat, sadistic, agribusiness, 
 corporatized meat, and the greedy manipulation of both genetics and the 
 law.  The artifice of the film’s aesthetic is always subtly emphasizing 
 the artificiality of the food.  But there are four embodiments of 
 conscience in the film, including the filmmaker Robert Kenner:  Eric 
 Schlosser, Michael Pollan, and Joel Salatin.  The film charts how and why 
 the villains not only outnumber mighty heroes, like these, but also how and 
 why they outbluff, outmuscle, and outspend all their opponents by billions 
 of often government-subsidized dollars.\n\nDivided into chapters dedicated 
 to points along the commercial food chain, the movie looks at animal abuse 
 in industrial food production — but its main focus is on the human cost.  
 It’s a cost visible in the rounded bodies of a poor family that eats 
 cheap but filling fast-food burgers for breakfast and in the faces of 
 farmers too frightened to go on record about Monsanto.\n\nThere’s 
 something horribly wrong with a system in which a bag of chips costs less 
 than a bag of carrots.  Corn is the vegetable-as-villain in this film which 
 builds on the work of nutritionists, journalists, activists, and authors 
 like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to show how multinationals have 
 taken over the production of almost all food.  Corn is kept at 
 unrealistically low prices by the government;  is fed to animals that 
 haven’t evolved to eat it (such as the cow);  causes them to develop 
 maladies that must be treated with antibiotics (which are passed on to 
 consumers);  and has led to the mutation of new strains of the E.coli 
 virus, which sickens tens of thousands each year.\n\nBig Agribusiness, just 
 like Big Oil, runs the very regulatory agencies that are supposed to 
 protect us, the consumers.  The film delves into the case of Monsanto, 
 which has monopolized the growing of corn by patenting the biology inside 
 it — and has been allowed to litigate against insurgent farmers through 
 court decisions rendered by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence 
 Thomas, a onetime Monsanto lawyer.  The whole system, the film says, is 
 fixed\n\nBut then Joel Salatin arrives on the scene to throw some natural 
 light onto the proceedings and illuminate just what can be done to salvage 
 agriculture and our digestive systems.  Disturbing as it is, this film 
 doesn’t present a doomsday scenario. People can make a difference, it 
 says — look what happened to Big Tobacco.\n\nWheelchair accessible around 
 the corner at  411  28th  Street\n\n$5 donations are accepted\n\n\n 
 https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/05/30/18649244.php
SUMMARY:Food, Inc.
LOCATION:Humanist Hall\n390  27th  Street\nmidtown Oakland, between Telegraph and 
 Broadway\nhttp://www.HumanistHall.org \n
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/05/30/18649244.php
DTSTART:20100624T023000Z
DTEND:20100624T043000Z
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