Tasty movie: Our Daily Bread

After having seen We Feed the World last fall, (in Austrian with Dutch subtitles unfortunately) I thought I had seen the best of the documentaries on food and food politics, Our daily bread however, proved to be a much more brutal analysis of food production and human involvment in a industrial process that has shaped itself around understanding and mechanising nature.

Basically the movie silently (there is no soundtrack or voiceover and the people filmed were obviously asked not to speak much) moves between crops of tomatoes, peppers, asparagus artificially grown in greenhouses, to the filming of slaughterhouses where we see fish, chickens and cows are being slaughtered, then cut to pieces and packaged. We see this however not only through the perspective of the animals but also through the people involved in these processes. Each scene picks a particular employee and follows him around as he picks, unemotionally and does his job almost mechanically (I’m sure you get bored of picking asparagus really quickly) and most importantly, to his lunch time where he faces the camera and silently eats his lunch (almost always sandwiches).

In a way it made much more of an impact on me than having any statistics told to me or post-rationslisation. The feeling of helplessness is profound after having seen this movie as you don’t know whether you should just simply start being a vegetarian and growing your own food or ignore it all as there is simply no way to avoid these industries. Avoiding them would also mean putting so many people out of a job, a job which allows them to sustain themselves and their families one would assume. I would be very surprised to hear that the organic industries operate that different because as demand increases for any product, delivery has to be more and more efficient and calculable which is why these industries got to where they are.

In shirt a must-see if you can stand the gore and suffering of animals coupled with stoicism of people.