Food on Films

Global warming. Carbon Dioxide. Ecological footprint. Greenhouse gases. Al Gore's Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, was without a doubt responsible for some of the buzz words of 2006 and 2007. And while I have yet to see a slide show with scarier and more depressing graphs and charts – with arrows and lines all pointing in the same direction of disaster approaching fast - there are a few other documentaries out there – most of them around the subject of food - that deserve our undivided attention. So put your feet up, grab a sugar free beverage of some kind and enjoy....not.


Film Title: “Super Size Me” (2004)
Also known as: "If you want to stay healthy, don’t eat anything that comes out of a bucket.”
Director: Morgan Spurlock

The idea for the film came about when two overweight Bronx schoolgirls brought a lawsuit against McDonald’s. In January 2003, the first version of the suit was dismissed, saying the teenagers failed to show McDonald's food was "dangerous in any way other than that which was open and obvious to a reasonable consumer."

The judge, however, allowed the teenagers’ attorneys to file again after they revised the suit to try to establish the existence of dangers "not commonly well known." The obesity suit was thrown out a second time and Morgan Spurlock set out to prove that McDonald’s sandwiches are indeed damaging to consumers’ health by eating nothing but the Golden Arches’ fare for 30 days, 3 times a day. He decided to work his way through the menu and only go for the supersize version if and when it was offered to him. Supersize menus, by the way, are a 2 litre bucket of soft drink and almost 200 grams of fries, together with the obligatory burger.

Throughout the film you see the change in Spurlock, from a healthy, active person with an average weight, to an overweight, listless blob who, like a drug addict, develops a habit and needs his next shot (read: McDonald’s meal) to make him feel good. Meanwhile, his incredulous doctor pleads with him to stop after a blood test reveals serious liver abnormalities, his girlfriend (a vegan!) complains about their almost- non-existing sex life and his nutritionist strongly advises him to stop drinking soda and opt for water instead.

Morgan’s “progress” is alternated with interviews with nutrition specialists and information on the fattest states in America. Texas being one of them, it is no surprise that he gets most supersize offers here. Meanwhile, his calls to talk to someone from the company are left unanswered.


Film Title: Darwin’s Nightmare (2005)
Also known as: “Mmm, now what would this little fish do?”
Director: Hubert Sauper

Mwanza, better known as “Fish City” in Tanzania. Some time in the 1960's, in this heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. A bucketful of Nile Perch, a voracious predator, was let loose into the world's largest tropical lake, and extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, thus creating a booming multinational industry of fish export. Doesn’t sound too bad you say, apart maybe from the tiny fact that an entire eco system was destroyed? Think again. The fish lives far out into the lake, out of reach of the impoverished local population’s small fishing boats. So the only ones who benefit from this are those who can afford bigger boats.

Sauper got the idea for this film during his research on another documentary, Kisangani Diary. For this one, he followed Rwandese refugees in the midst of the Congolese rebellion. In 1997, he witnessed for the first time the bizarre juxtaposition of two gigantic airplanes, both bursting with food. The first cargo jet brought 45 tons of yellow peas from America to feed the refugees in the nearby UN camps. The second plane took off for the European Union, carrying with it 50 tons of fresh fish. He became mates with the Russian pilots and found out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carry arms and ammunition destined for civil wars in neighbouring countries, so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas, could be shot at later during the night. It was this first hand knowledge that became the trigger for Darwin’s Nightmare.

Sauper’s interviews on location in Tanzania are quite often done secretly, as they could never really show up as a regular film team. They had to carry fake identities and a lot of the film budget was wasted on bribes. He interviews a number of people connected to events in Mwanza, such as pilots, factory owners, fishermen, bar girls, priests and journalists. Half the Tanzanian population, it emerges, subsists on less than $1 dollar a day. So while in the West, these white fish fillets are served with the obligatory splash of lemon, the dirt poor local villagers have to content themselves with eating scraps from the rotting, worm infested perch carcasses. And nothing goes to waste here. The plastic packaging that is used for the fish is melted over small fires and turned into some kind of glue. The substance is used by gangs of glue-sniffing, mostly orphaned children.


Film Title: Our Daily Bread (2007)
Also known as: “Old MacDonald sold his farm and works in a factory now”
Director: Nikolaus Geyrhalter

In sealed, sterile rooms chicks hatch while being closely monitored. A huge hose sucks salmon out of a fjord. Metal teeth chomp up fields of sunflowers which, thanks to chemicals, have withered at just the right time. On mechanized conveyer systems, chickens are cut up and pigs are gutted in seconds. Cows take a little longer.

Our Daily Bread (Unser tägliches Brot) offers us an insight into the world of hightech agriculture and food industrialisation and totally destroys the idyllic image of healthy, grazing cows in pastures green and of smiling rosy-cheeked farmers harvesting their crops. What is left are surreal landscapes which are optimized for agricultural machinery, clean rooms in cool industrial buildings designed for maximum efficiency, and elaborate machines that operate on a 'disassembly line' basis. It is completely soulless and surreal to think that machines are producing our food. There are hardly any people present and the ones that are shown scarily resemble their mechanical surroundings, almost looking like robots in their chemical suits, with ear protectors and helmets. You can’t help but wondering how long it will be until the machines will take over their jobs as well.

There are no interviews, no off-screen comments, only the sounds of the machines whirring and clanking. Film critics have compared Our Daily Bread to “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Koyaanisqatsi” with one reviewer, clearly worried about possible side effects on die-hard meat eaters, claiming that “...it’s not a vegetarian film, however, because plants and crops are treated with the same disdain...”