Keith Davis, 6/30/2009
ITHACA, NY — The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) and Cinemapolis will present a limited engagement of “Food, Inc.,” a documentary that examines the role massive factory farms and huge processing plants play in delivering food to America’s dinner tables. The first showing of the film will take place at 7 p.m. on Friday, July 10, at Cinemapolis’s new location at 120 E. Green St., and be followed by a discussion featuring Peter McDonald, owner of a family-owned, 220-acre pasture-based farm committed to restorative agricultural practices for clean food production. General admission for the event is $9; tickets for seniors (64 and older) and children (12 and under) are $7.50.
In “Food, Inc.” producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) invite filmgoers to think twice about the food they buy at their local supermarkets. Although consumers can now avail themselves of bigger chickens, perfect pork chops, insecticide-free soybean seeds and tomatoes that won’t go bad, Americans must also face new strains of illness-inducing e coli bacteria, the result of cattle being given feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest.
The evidence in “Food, Inc.” suggests that corporate giants, including Monsanto, Perdue, Smithfield and Tyson, control the nation’s food supply, putting profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and the environment. Regulatory agencies like the USDA and FDA are rendered ineffective by a dysfunctional political system operating at the expense of the American consumer. It’s important to note, say the filmmakers, that their requests for interviews by representatives from those four companies were declined.
In providing a new look at America’s food industry, “Food, Inc.” provides its viewers with a chance to rethink what they eat, how their food is produced and what they as consumers can do about it.
Launched in 1997 as an outreach project sponsored by Ithaca College, Cornell University’s Center for the Environment and Eunadi Center for International Studies and others, FLEFF is now under the auspices of the Ithaca College Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies. FLEFF has become a major regional event in upstate New York and enjoys an international reputation as a cutting-edge, multi-arts program.
For more information, contact faculty co-directors Patricia Zimmermann at (607) 274-3431 or patty@ithaca.edu, or Tom Shevory at (607) 274-1347 or shevory@ithaca.edu.
Originally published in News Releases: Upcoming Film At Cinemapolis Takes A Hard Look At The Food We Eat.
