Food, Inc., the movie that pilloried the conventional U.S. agriculture industry in 2008, now has a sequel, Food, Inc. 2, which trains its lens on continued consolidation in the food industry and what are known as ultra-processed foods.
Filmmakers Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo were in Washington, D.C., to promote the film ahead of its nationwide premiere on April 12. They told Agri-Pulse they did not want to make a sequel, but were compelled to do so by the impacts of the COVID pandemic on the U.S. food supply chain and on workers at meatpacking plants, who contracted the virus in large numbers.
“It just helped sort of bring into focus so much that we felt was not good about the food system,” Kenner said, also mentioning as an example farmworkers who, despite being labeled “essential,” couldn’t get COVID tests.
The sequel's focus on consolidation in the ag and food sectors comes as the Biden administration has been trying to tie the issue to food inflation.
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“Consolidation helped to create a very brittle food system,” Kenner said. “Then we saw a breakdown during the pandemic with empty supermarkets.”
Robledo said that while the first film was about how consumers can influence the system through their choices of what to buy, “ultimately, what we're saying is that, to change the system, it's going to take a lot more political will. We need an appetite to enforce the antitrust laws that we already have.”
She acknowledged that “we’re seeing some of that,” mentioning the Federal Trade Commission’s recent lawsuit to block the merger of Kroger and Albertsons.
The film also looks at plant-based foods and cultivated meats, ultimately not coming down on one side or the other of the debate. “Our take on these new foods is rather ambiguous, which is weird to do in a film,” Kenner said.
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