Premiering Tonight: Food, Inc. 2
Dear friends and readers,
Some big news this week: the sequel to Food, Inc. will have its premiere tonight in Washington, DC. and will be screened in theaters around the nation, followed by its release in theaters and online on Friday, April 12.
Four years in the making, Food, Inc. 2 explores the state of our food system fifteen years after the first documentary shone a bright light on both the abuses of Big Food and industrial agriculture but also on the wave of innovation and reform in the early 2000s that came to be known as “The Food Movement.”
Food, Inc. 2, which I co-produced with Eric Schlosser, and which Robby Kenner and Melissa Robledo directed, was “inspired” by the pandemic, which exposed the vulnerabilities of the industrial food chain that feeds us—until it doesn’t. We all remember those first months, when farmers found themselves destroying crops and euthanizing livestock at the same time supermarket shelves were going bare. Meanwhile, meat plants had become Covid hotspots where workers were dying, but rather than close down, as public health authorities insisted, powerful meatpackers like Tyson forced President Trump to sign an executive order keeping their production lines moving, despite the cost–in lives—to their employees.
Those dark days showed us the perils of a food system dominated by a small handful of powerful companies—perils not only for consumers but also for workers and the farmers and ranchers who supply them—when competition is replaced by monopoly. One of the messages of the film is that the hope we could reform the food system by “voting with our forks” was naïve, since it will take political action and policy change to counter the power of an industry that has only grown more concentrated since 2008.
That’s one lesson. Another is that the American diet and its impact on our health has only gotten worse since then. Diet-related diseases have now surpassed smoking as the leading cause of death in America. It’s no wonder: close to 70% of the food Americans eat are “ultra-processed.” That was not a term you heard back in 2008, but since then, a body of scientific evidence has emerged that these foods—made using ingredients and additives and machinery no one has at home—are uniquely harmful, and have been linked not only to weight gain and Type 2 diabetes, but to more than fifty other diseases and disorders. Food, Inc. 2 explores this alarming new research and the food industry’s effort to suppress it.
But Food, Inc. 2 also identifies grounds for hope: in some innovative new approaches to farming, aquaculture and food science; in programs to improve the meals schools feed our children; and in the political arena, where the effort to reform the food system and enforce our antitrust laws has found powerful allies in the Biden Administration and in Congress. Senators Cory Booker and Jon Tester both make appearances in Food, Inc. 2 that I found inspiring.
I hope you’ll have a chance to see the film and also to engage with the social impact campaign that Participant, the studio that produced the film, has launched to accompany the release. To learn more and get involved, visit foodinc2.com.
One other bit of news: with the generous help of the team at Wordpress, I’ve updated and expanded my website, michaelpollan.com. Here you can find links to the trailer for the film and a bunch of other projects I’m involved with, as well as a searchable database of all my articles (free for download), and a listing of my upcoming appearances. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think.
All best,