Review: Food, Inc.

VIDEO: The trailer for Food, Inc.

You are what you eat. And if you're like most Americans, you eat hamburgers made from cows who likely spent their lives crowded in fetid factory farms, ankle-deep in mud and excrement. And chickens artificially bred to grow so big, so fast, that the birds can barely support their own weight.

And corn. Lots and lots of corn. Corn in ketchup and salad dressing and peanut butter and jelly and juice and cola and nearly every component of the fast-food "value meal" you just wolfed down at lunch.

But as Robert Kenner shows in his excellent new documentary (which is as visually flashy as it is viscerally alarming), that "value" is illusory. The massively mechanized corporate production processes that stock the average supermarket with 47,000 brands of low-priced food are insidiously damaging our environment, our economy, our culture, and our health. And as such talking heads as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) explain, only we as citizens and consumers can change that.