We at ELV really don’t like movies. As with most fiction and music, We consider most of them a waste of time.

We sort of make an exception for art, because great art makes you think. And when is the last time you could say that about some Hollywood film?

But occasionally a movie comes along with a message that makes you do just that….a message that entertains and informs and has you thinking about it long after you leave the theatre.

And Food Inc. is just such a film. It is a movie that sheds such a strong and important light on what we shove into our mouths everyday, that you cannot afford not to see it.

The message of Food Inc. is that the giant corporations that control our food supply don’t want us to know what we’re eating. Ignorance is bliss to their corporate thinking, and the less we know about how that chicken was raised, or the predatory practices of soybean farming, the more we will continue blissfully strolling down the center aisles of our supermarkets, shoving processed corn, soy and wheat products into our pieholes to their everloving profits and our everlasting doom.

If you’ve read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation or Michael Pollan’s Ominvore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food, nothing on the screen will be news to you. But watching an overweight, diabetes-ridden poor family fill up on cheap protein from a fast food window drives home the point that we have sold our souls to high-fructose corn-syrup, genetically-adulterated soy-fed-white-meat-bred-botched-bovine-mad-cow-corporate madness. The thinking of which goes something like: because we can do something (and make a healthy profit) we should do it.

All of which might make sense when you’re talking about energy alternatives or flying to the moon – but crashes upon the ancient rocks of human biology and common sense when you start messing with how mother nature intended us to be fed.

The facts are we are the most unhealthy first world country on the planet – one in five children born after 2000 will suffer from juvenile diabetes – one in two if they come from a minority background.

There is a direct cause and effect between the over-sugared, fat and carb-laden meals that lower income families can feast on, and these statistics. Food Inc. drives home the point that back in the fifties, government subsidies allowed the wheat, corn and soybean mega-farms to produce such an abundance of these easily storable commodities, that it was only a matter of time until food scientists figured out how to adulterate them into virtually every kind of food imaginable. And it’s a short hop from artificially low production costs to a 99 cent Happy Meal.

In the beginning of the movie, Pollan relates that we’ve done more to alter the way and what we eat in the last fifty years than we had in the previous ten thousand. This is something that only we (as consumers) can stop.

If you care about your health, your family’s health, or the future of our country’s health you need to see Food Inc. It’s a movie that’s too important to ignore, and one even a curmudgeonly food critic can love.

So important is this movie that  we are now inspired (as frequently we are on our Facebook and Twitter feeds) to haiku:

Essential movies

Don’t entertain but inform

FOOD INC. feeds your brain