Food, Inc. at the Berlin Berlinale

My good friend M. invited me to see Food, Inc. at the Berlin film festival Sunday. Surprisingly, over a thousand people cared about the American food system enough to see the movie. Then again, food touches everything: workers' rights for those who grow American food, energy and environmental concerns, public health, agriculture, intellectual property law for seed ownership, animal welfare and/or rights.

Food, Inc. basically takes a look at who makes our food and how they make it. Our current system depends on petroleum, antibiotics, and cheap labor. The factory system of food production values uniformity, speed, size, and cheapness. To make everything cheap, machines do more and more processing. To make sure that everything fits our machines, we make our chickens (and everything else like vegetables and fruits) as uniform as possible. Driven by profit, the industrial food production system has no incentive to be accountable to waste, public health or environmental damage. It is in corporate interest, not national interest. And even though it is 'cheap' and 'fast', it is not efficient because it is not sustainable. It will destroy itself and us...

Food production should not be about growth but health and flavor. Industrial food production changes the taste of vegetables and fruits through breeding for ease of transport and GMO manipulation and/or contamination.

Monsanto prevents the labeling of GMO foods, just was it was against labels that revealed calories, trans fats, and country of origin. 70% of processed foods in the US contains GMO ingredients, but no one knows. There is even a 'veggie libel law' in farm states that forbids people from publishing photos of feed lot operations and speaking out against 'veggies'.

Did you know that engineers can basically combine aromas and mouthfeels to make anything they want us to taste? Most of these are based on ingredients from highly-processed corn, soy, and wheat, like high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, di-glycerides, the list goes on... So they can tweak them towards what we are programmed to want: salt, fat, sugar. Eating too much of these wears down how we process sugar and may lead to diabetes.

The movie echoes what my CSA farmers in Connecticut always said to me: 'Know your food.' Meaning, know where your food comes from and how it is made and what is in it. If you knew,
you would want to buy organic, local foods that are in season. And we have a right to know, no matter if the biotech companies think that knowing about cloned meat might 'confuse the consumer'.

Afterwards, at the panel discussion, I was surprised to see the parallels between German and American food production systems.

Slow Food, an organization with roots in Italy, values biodiversity and the union of producers and co-producers (their word for consumers). They want to change how food is produced, to de-industrialize food for traditional practices. The solution to the problems of industrial production is not ever more high-technology but a return to local, culture-specific culinary traditions.

During the panel discussion Michael Pollan thanked and engaged the representative from Cingento, which I inferred was the German/EU equivalent of Monsanto. In the representative's view, 'we protect plants' so that producers generate certain yields at a good quality. To achieve this, we need technology, with gene technology as only one technology among many for food production. According to him, the rate of growth for non-GMO foods is 1-1.5%. He did not specify how much GMO food production grows, but other sources say that yield of GMO seeds are now falling. In addition, using patented gene technology means the loss of seed sovereignty. As Food, Inc. shows, farmers are forever dependent on and indebted to Monsanto after they start using their seeds. They cannot save and reuse their seeds.

The German Minister of Consumer Safety also spoke at the panel. She wanted to democratize good food via government policy. She advocated for citizens' rights to know what is in our food and how it is made--notably, through organic and GMO labeling. Because the EU required GMO labeling, there is no GMO foods in the supermarket--no one would buy it. The minister said that she wanted to label foods' sugar and fat content with red, green, and yellow lights, but the food industry blocked it because no one would then buy their products.

According to the German organic farmer, 80% of Germans on the street want organic but only 4% actually buy organic on the market. His pessimistic conclusion was that organic costs too much for the average German, double the amount of normal food, because it is inefficiently produced. Luckily, someone pointed out that conventional growing methods are also very inefficient in terms of energy consumption. The only reason that they SEEM cheap is because they are subsidized.

In Brussels, multinationals lobby the EU Commission and the European Parliament. There is no farming lobby. We need a food movement to ask to subsidize organic, local, small producers and distributors.

The powerful message behind this movie is now that we know the sources of our food, we have to ask our governments to police it for our health and safety. Against the powerful and well-funded meat and dairy lobbies, we have to show Obama the movement against subsidies for bad food, which are holdovers from Nixon and the Cold War. The battle against tobacco should be a model for us.

Interestingly, the only speaker from the Global South was the actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Like the moderator, I was blinded by his good looks and forgot to take notes while he spoke. But he was the one who was pushing a radical agenda for land reform to distribute land to its farmers. Perhaps he was the only one, as an activist movie star, who could afford a radical agenda.

The EU throws away 50,000 tons of food every day. The US throws away 70,000 tons of food every day. Waste is a tactic of capitalist production. Hunger is a social, not technological, problem. It is a human right to eat well and with pleasure.