Interview with Food Inc. director

[Guest guest]

From Tara Lohan's interview with Food Inc. director Robert Kenner at

http://www.alternet.org/story/140890/

TL: To me one of the shocking numbers in the film were the figures for diabetes,

which you mentioned -- 1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 and 1 in 2 who are

minorities -- are there people in the health community who are drawing these

connections?

RK: Oh yeah, that's why we can't have health care reform without fixing that.

Diabetes is going to be so expensive. I really hope that we battle this idea of

elitism, that people say that the can only afford bad food. That's why I think

that family in the film was so important, because we have people who have a hard

time paying for healthier, less-processed food, but meanwhile, they are now

paying for it in their health care costs. The invisible costs are becoming very

real for them, and how many people in that community have diabetes is

astounding. They could not believe I didn't know someone without Type 2

Diabetes.

TL: So, based on everything you've learned in this film, do you think of our

food as being safe to eat?

RK: I try not to eat industrialized foods as much. What is the bigger danger, is

the idea of how they figure out how to deliver salt, sugar and fat to us.

Sixty-four percent of Americans are either overweight or obese. I think, like

tobacco they are trying to figure out how to sell you a product that is a bit

addicting, and they are using billions of dollars of advertising, and they are

training kids to do it at an early age, and they are overwhelming taste buds. So

that's the scary part.

TL: One of the things I liked in the film was talking, not just about the

environmental and health impacts of the food we are eating, but about the labor

laws and the treatment of the workers in some of the processing plants.

RK: For me, one of the shocks of making this film was that at every rural

location we went to there were parts of towns that only spoke Spanish and that

our food is grown and processed by illegal immigrants, and it is really this

hypocritical world that we live in because we are depending on them to deliver

this inexpensive food to the supermarket, but yet we also don't want them in our

communities because people think it taxes communities -- the health care and

schools.

But unfortunately, the people who get arrested are the workers who are working

hard and doing their part, and the reason they are being hired is because they

are doing difficult, dangerous, low-paying jobs, and only people without rights

would want to do that work. And that for me was as important as talking about

how the animals are mistreated -- I tried not to even go there. But people are

always shocked by animal mistreatment in the film, and I didn't think I even put

it in.

TL: I think there were some pretty gruesome scenes.

RK: God, I was just talking with my editor, and we thought we took them out.

What you don't see in this film, and I didn't even want to go there ... you see

the chickens, but the fact is that pigs don't move except for the day they are

executed, or cows just sit in their own excrement -- you know thousands of them

in these giant factory feedlots. We've created megafactories, and it's not just

the meat, it is the tomatoes and all the way down the line -- we've created a

machine of great efficiency that produces the food rather inexpensively, but it

comes with great consequence.