Mike, I haven’t paid any attention to the promotion for this film, so I can’t comment on the arrogance or lack of arrogance of the filmmakers.

However …

As someone who has eaten more than her share of crap over the years (and will no doubt continue to do so), I strongly support all efforts to encourage people to eat better and more local. As much as possible, I shop at the Green Market, because 1) I know I’m lucky to be able to do so and 2) it’s good for the economy of my region and 3) I like buying my food from people who raised it.

Sure, it can be at least as expensive as buying from the supermarket. That’s because, for the most part, the farmers pay their workers a living wage, in America. I’m in favor of that.

When I buy pork products for John from the Flying Pig farm, I know the pigs weren’t raised like the ones in Mexico that incubated swine flu. I’m in favor of that, too.

Also, the more we buy organic (local or not), the cheaper it will get.

We’ve shared more than a few meals together. We eat almost none of the same things (unless they are fried). Here’s hoping that doesn’t make me one of the food police.

Food police? In this country their names are ConAgra and Kraft. If you want to eat something the combine isn’t selling you’ve really got to shake a tail feather, either in your garden or your source of trade credits. Sugar sweet but in the hands of a bearded boogey man? Throw up some tariffs and squeeze the corn a little harder. Canned crap go down a little better with some salt? Throw it in! Don’t have a stroke about it. Oh, wait, you will get a stroke about it.

I remember sitting with a New York opinion leader in a playground (now demolished) near the Union Square Green Market as he scoffed at the merchandise around him as “designer greens.” The stuff is better because it’s fresher than what’s in the supermarket distribution system and, while it’s available, May through September, we buy it. To do otherwise would be to curse my lying eyes.

Fresher is better; after it picks it starts to rot. First the taste goes and then the nutrition. In the winter we’re happy to have decent stuff in the supermarket. It’s cheaper and worth it. I can esp recommend the frozen stuff in Birds Eyes premium line, esp the baby peas. Had a supermarket system piece of broccolli in April that was better fit for scraping a battleship. After a summer of good stuff it’s tough to go back to the stuff that ’s been on the truck from California and Florida, or, these days, a plane from somewhere in the southern hemisphere. If you would eat well out of a supermarket, it would best be in a place without a killing frost.

We’re at least a generation away from having the science and the longitudinal studies to know what the effect is of what we eat on our short lives in our one bodies. Last round of research on popular/advertised/expensive vitamins and supplements came back with the news they were all crap. Thank your lucky stars for the placebo effect.

Yeah the do gooders can be insufferable. The Devil’s got all the good songwriters. Wonder what’s the special tonight in Hell? My vote is for Kraft Dinner and Spam. Mmm.

As a rule, people who tell us that things are bad for us talk as if we don’t know. They speak as if speaking to children who can’t possibly understand what they’re doing to themselves.

Here’s the deal - unless you’re older than when they started putting the warnings on cigarette packs, you know damn well what they do to you. If you eat at McDonalds or any other fast food palace, you know damn well that enough of those burgers will do terrible things to you. You don’t need a well-meaning busybody reminding you. We know damn well what it will do, and we do it anyway. So shut up.

“God bless you sir,” says Drew Carey, “I almost had a moment of joy”.

The message and the goal is moderation. But we’re not real good at moderation here. We either indulge to excess, go cold turkey (usually because we’re scared into it) and then can’t take it anymore and binge, swearing to stop again in the morning. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

Going to KFC once in a while won’t kill you, unless you have some very specific health issues, or they’re giving away free grilled chicken and you get trampled.

General McDonald and the Chicken Chunk Commandos are not breaking down your door and cramming the Big Macs down your throat. Advertising can be resisted, and choices can be made. The only way the Food Inc crowd can talk us out of our choices is to come up with better ones. Coming up with nightmare scenarios to scare us out of our habits only works so long as no one notices that the scenario isn’t coming true.

There is a delicious irony when these folks who are “greener than thou” get to talk down to us normies, isn’t there? If those who have the means aren’t driving a hybrid, buying the better lightbulbs, eating only the locally sustainable organic produce and meat… well… they’re just not trying hard enough. But as you say, American’s are living longer, are on the whole quite healthy, and the sky is still blue when I look out the window. Surely we need to take steps to be more friendly to the earth… but those who can’t afford the premiums to do that shouldn’t be penalized, reprimanded, and made to feel inadequate.

Does Hubert Keller stand outside a McDonalds to laugh at a family who couldn’t afford an appetizer at Fleur De Lis? Heck no. These “greener” products (food included) may taste better / last longer / make more ecological sense… but screw you… I don’t make enough money as it is. Should I go deeper into debt just to ensure I’m pleasing former hippies turned millionaires?

I’m all for loving the earth. But you know, until your organic hamburger and organic french fries (served with hormone free locally sustainable tomato catsup and oceanic sea salt) costs the same, or hell, even CLOSE to my big mac and fries? Sorry… I gotta save my money for comics.

Like many others here, I know that eating better food will make me healthier. But convenience and laziness makes it hard for most people to eat better foods.

Genetically modified corn products exist for one main reason these days: the company that makes a GM corn gets all future rights to the use of that corn. This includes the financial rights. Meanwhile, no long term studies have been done as to the safety of these products. Because they are modifications of existing things that have been approved, the GM product is cleared for use.

I eat my share of crap, but I don’t justify it by saying I can’t afford healthy alternatives. In general, the healthy alternatives really aren’t all that much more expensive, and quite frankly the majority of Americans should probably eat considerably less than they do now.

Live within ten miles of a CAFO for a while, and you might become less sympathetic to those who say they can’t afford anything other than assembly line meat, particularly if those folks are complaining at you via their brand new iphones.

For most of us, it’s all about choices.

I have yet to see anything for this film, other than the current rating on Rottentomatoes.com (94%, apparently the critics don’t mind pretentiousness).

I can’t say I’m surprised the same people who look down their nose at so many of us in person do it in film. I’m not much for green living because I’ve honestly done well without it. My new girlfriend is getting me to buy more green products, but its not a high percentage.

I do agree with the aim of movies like this, I do. But as you mentioned MOTU “I can’t afford that” either. I actually priced out going totally green, and I would spend nearly twice what I spend on food. Until something happens showing me I can’t take Agrozilla anymore I’ll probably rely heavily on it.

Rick said.. “….they can’t afford anything other than assembly line meat, particularly if those folks are complaining at you via their brand new iphones.

For most of us, it’s all about choices.”

Boom. There it is.

Morgan Spurlock took a personal tack in Supersize me, and did a fairly good job of keeping the message tame and sane. He even portrayed the alternate view, to a degree - the guy who has eaten one Big Mac a day minimum for several years, and the guy who had a “McDonalds diet”. But ultimately the message was “A man eats like that he is going to die…” and my response was not “When?” but “Well, duh…”

The thing that will make more of these healthier products available is demand. As each new trend becomes popular, more foods become available to accomodate them. The Wife has to eat Gluten-Free, and has been baking her own bread and other bread products for a couple years now. (She has a couple recipes for gluten-free brownies and blondies that are nigh-undetectable from the real thing) In just those few years, the number of gluten-free products have skyrocketed, as “gluten-free” has become the new black of the food industry. But all told, the majority of the breads available have the taste and texture of drywall, so she finds it easier, cheaper and more self-empowering to make her own. But they’re trying - more things are available every day, and eventually they’ll get it right.

I recall an episode of Penn & Teller Bullshit talking about food science, particularly about an African country who was talked into turning down countless bushels of grain and feed for their starving nation by a group of well-meaning busybodies because the grain in question was “genetically modified” and against what THEY thought was good and pure.

These people can’t and won’t delineate between types of experimentation. Any and all advences in science is evil and wrong. Tell that to the tomato, corn, peppers, and all the other fruits and vegetables that wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for experimentation. I guess they only count as “frankenfoods” if they were made by Americans in the last century or so.

Not to mention the Crunchberry, which according to one lady, is a real fruit, or at least she thought it was…

It is amusing when some of these Food Police talk about how these cereals are toxic to our children and the companies are bad for putting them out. Last time I checked, the kids weren’t stocking up on the cereal, it was the parents buying them. But I guess it’s not the parents’ fault for what their children eat, it’s the mean old cereal company.

I take the train to and from work everday in the DC area and on them lately have been these posters mentioning the hazards of giving livestock too many antibiotics. It’s informative and comes across as educational, at least to me it does. It’s when I see the equivalent of “You’re eating filth you moron!” that I just tune it out and feel like eating a burger in front of these people.

I agree with the sentiment above in how people will purchase what they can afford. My mother did what she could to make sure my brother and I ate well, but when a family pack of chicken costs less at a Stop&Shop than what is sold at some organic market, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see what people will buy.

As you say Mike… it’s about organizing. If there’s a way for an organization to provide the solutions instead of preaching obnoxiously to me, I’m 100% for it. The issue for you is more delivery than substance… Most all of us here agree that a cleaner, greener, better food supply would be great to have.

I hope I live to see the day the Whole Foods market opens next to Aldi, and family living half on food stamps can shop at either.

Oh god, is there an Aldi near you? I found out about these places when we moved to PA. What a sad and pitiable chain that is - no name brands of barely palatable foods that you can’t argue are fairly priced, but as good an example of “You get what you pay for” as I’ve seen these days.

The sole place sadder was a store that sold, so help me, damaged food. Water-stained boxes of breakfast cereal, dented cans, milk and bread with hours to go on their “best before” dates…the kind of groceries that proper stores have to throw away. Well, apparently they DON’T throw them away, they unload them to stores like this, or god help us, just lets these stores know what day they’re going to leave them them on the loading dock “For the garbageman”.

The really sad part? There were doing good business.

It closed down some time ago, hopefuily as a result of someone asking “What the hell are you DOING?!?!” It totally felt like dumpster diving by proxy.

True enough, and I thank god every day that I am far from that position, believe you me.

But I all but guarantee that just like my example in Africa, were that food given gratis to those who need it, there would be well-meaning busybodies pushing it away, saying it’s “demeaning” or some such term to give it to them, like the lady who gave Elaine the muffin stumps back.

And behind them would be the tired and poor saying, “You know, we don’t mind…” and they’d be shushed as one would a precocious toddler in church while the food is wretchedly refused.

Yes, there are needy people in this country and in other countries who will be happy to take food that organic purists decry as “toxic”; and yes, those people will be much better off with that food than with none at all; and yes, most of it isn’t really “toxic”. But there is ample evidence to suggest that our current agricultural practices are not sustainable. Eating “better” food is just as much about the exterior environment as the interior one, and if we destroy the environment that provides our food, we’ll all join the ranks of the needy, starving people.

I chose my wording very carefully in my original comment: “For MOST of us…” — and I stand by my original comment. For MOST of us, me make a choice to spend our money elsewhere, often on things we don’t really need.

And before you sink your teeth into your next cheeseburger or BBQ pork sandwich, or even your next grilled chicken, read up on where that shit comes. Google the term “CAFO”.

I’m not exactly without sin here — but I don’t tell myself it’s because I can’t afford the alternative, nor do I claim it’s because I’m offended by the snooty assholes who chastise me for my weakness.

Limit Weird Al? OK, NOW you’re over the line.

Al’s new song “Craigslist” is up on YouTube

Now we’re really veering off point. Into an uncomfortable silence.
@Vinnie … I don’t buy much at aldi, but for the money ($1 a bag) the romaine salad mix is a damn good buy.