At this year’s Soil Association conference I was chatting with Mike Small of the Fife Diet in Scotland. He told a story about how a film crew from Sky News came up to Fife to do a news story about their work. While they were filming, Mike chatted to the director and asked him what was the angle on the story. “Well”, said the director, “it’s about a community eating local food”. “Amazing to think that that’s now seen as news!” said Mike. Of course, now such a thing is news, so bizarrely distorted has our food system (and our media, but that’s another story) become. Unfortunately the sprawling monster that actually now feeds most of us isn’t news, but only because it is so well hidden, something that the excellent new film ‘Food Inc’ tries to change. Robert Kenner’s new film has already been nominated for an Oscar and described as being ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ about food. The praise the film has recieved is very much justified. It is both ruthless and compassionate, investigative and poignant. It …show more content…
Both are powerful and compelling presences on screen, and they hold the different stories told by the film together beautifully. Among the tales told are how McDonalds became the giant it is today, how corn is now in virtually all convenience foods, how beef is now raised, never seeing even a blade of grass, the miserable life that is the lot of a chicken today and how GM is taking over US agriculture at a pace. Many of these things will not be new to Transition Culture readers, but the thing that stayed in my mind the longest was the story of the man who is the last guy in his area with a seed cleaning machine. Basically, if you want to save your seed and reuse them the following year, you need to have them ‘cleaned’ with this guy’s machine. Monsanto don’t like people saving seeds, and if you reuse their seeds, it is