The beauty of being taken down by illness is the opportunity to lay on the couch and catch up with some movies that have been in the queue. One such film was FOOD inc., a documentary that provided a concise summary of the content of Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma – two books (both now films) that, amongst others, literally spawned dozens of books and other films about our nations food industry.

A clip from the website: “… filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation’s food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.”

Finally, here’s the trailer for the film… perhaps it was being overly medicated, or groggy, but this film really moved me and is worth checking out (for those of you on Netflix, you can stream it online if you just can’t wait for that next red envelope).