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Thread: Watch what you eat, if you dare

  1. #1
    LuC's Avatar
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    Default Watch what you eat, if you dare

    I picked up this article up from another forum that I visit frequently and thought you might be interested in reading it.

    NYT
    November 22, 2006
    By CHRISTINE MUHLKE

    Quote:Watch What You Eat, if You Dare

    THREE years ago the Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter grew curious about what lay behind the sunny images of food in advertisements and packages. He had read that Europeans were spending 8 percent of their income on food. In the 1950s the figure was 30 percent, and Mr. Geyrhalter wondered what, apart from an increase in affluence, made modern meals so cheap.

    Mr. Geyrhalter channeled his curiosity into a documentary, “Our Daily Bread,” which opens in New York on Friday at Anthology Film Archives. “Fast Food Nation,” the book that inspired countless Americans to stop asking for “fries with that,” has been made into a feature film by Richard Linklater, complete with stars and an indie soundtrack. But “Our Daily Bread” could do much more to catalyze the move toward Slow Food nation.

    The film depicts the mechanical monotony of industrialized food production, where the difference between a cow and an apple is a matter of equipment, and where humans are employed only when there isn’t yet a machine efficient enough to replace them. Each section of the 92-minute film is composed with attention to the scale and symmetry of these food factories, making it as much an art film as a political statement.

    In Mr. Geyrhalter’s long, static shots, chicks shoot from a tube into baskets on a conveyor belt in an endless peeping blur. Pigs are processed in a ghoulish mechanical ballet. “Vine ripened” vegetables grow in neat rows inside a vast greenhouse complex, planted in plastic-wrapped pallets of nutrient-soaked matter and suspended by strings from a network of cables. Salmon sucked from a fjord are sawed open, eviscerated and vacuumed clean in seconds.

    “ ‘Our Daily Bread’ is a documentary that could probably find a place in a course on science fiction films,” said Richard Peña, the chairman of the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, where the movie was shown to acclaim this fall. “Geyrhalter presents a world that looks like ours but seems one step removed from it. Of course the conceit is that indeed what he’s showing us is our world, whether we know it or not. And whether we like it or not.”

    At 34, Mr. Geyrhalter has directed six documentaries on such subjects as the first year of peace in Bosnia and life in the restricted zone near Chernobyl. He made “Our Daily Bread” in Europe. Getting permission to film wasn’t always easy, but he said that when he wasn’t allowed to enter a poultry plant in, say, Germany, he would simply find another, nearly identical, place in Spain or Poland.

    During editing, Mr. Geyrhalter removed all the interviews. Even the workers who are seen eating alone on lunch breaks — effectively marking the end of the conveyor belt — do not speak.

    “I had the feeling that as soon as somebody starts talking, even if it’s interviews, the audience expects explanations and somebody to be blamed,” the director said last month from a hilltop near his weekend home in the Austrian countryside, where he had driven to find a cellphone signal.

    “And since food has to do with everybody, I just didn’t want to give the audience any chance to escape because they all have the responsibility for what they buy.”

    Since completing the film, Mr. Geyrhalter said, he eats less meat and buys organic food when he can. While he said that the recent spate of books and films that take on agribusiness could have some impact on certain consumers, he is not optimistic about more sweeping changes.

    “You will never reach the majority,” he said. “Whatever we see in the movie is just part of our reality, and it will always stay part of our reality.”


    You can see the trailer to this movie here but I must warn those that are sensitive to graphic images that trailer #3 is can be disturbing.

    The website for this film:
    The good man is the friend of all living things. -- Mohandas Gandhi

  2. #2
    frugivorous aubergine's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare.

    I'll have to look out for that. I'm really glad it was filmed in Europe for a change. It's easy for people to dismiss this kind of thing as being foreign to European life.

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    Justin's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare.

    the website link doesn't seem to be there, am I missing something or should I just do a search?

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    LuC's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare.

    No you are not missing anything Justin. I'm sorry I didn't notice that it did not end up posting. I'll try again.

    http://ourdailybread.at/jart/project...=1130864824947
    The good man is the friend of all living things. -- Mohandas Gandhi

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    flying plum's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare.

    that looks great...it's a shame it doesn't seem to be getting a UK release...i'd have liked to get my boyfriend to watch it. he might be more open to this, especially as the maker is not vegetarian. he often eyes the PETA material etc as overly-biased propaganda and does not view them with an open mind as a result.

    amanda

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    LuC's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare.

    The film has not been released in Canada yet either but I suspect it will make its way over eventually.

    If the film is done in an unbiased way it can be a very powerful tool. The truth is sometimes difficult to accept.
    The good man is the friend of all living things. -- Mohandas Gandhi

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    CarrotCruncher applepie's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare

    I've seen the film, and I can only recommend it.
    However, I liked "We Feed The World" even better, an Austrian film, but you'd have to be able to understand German to watch it.
    First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man.
    Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.
    Victor Hugo

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    LuC's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare

    Quote applepie View Post
    However, I liked "We Feed The World" even better, an Austrian film, but you'd have to be able to understand German to watch it.
    That sounds like an interesting film. I will have to keep an out eye for that. May be it will have sub-titles.
    The good man is the friend of all living things. -- Mohandas Gandhi

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    CarrotCruncher applepie's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare

    You can watch the trailer here: http://www.essen-global.de/trailer.html
    I don't know if it comes with subtitles; the film has some German subtitles because of the Austrian dialect some of the farmers speak
    There's an interview with the Nestlé boss at the end of the film - it makes me angry just to think about it. How he's saying that water is a commodity like anything else and thus needs to have a market price...
    First it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man.
    Now it is necessary to civilize man in relation to nature and the animals.
    Victor Hugo

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    LuC's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare

    Quote applepie View Post
    How he's saying that water is a commodity like anything else and thus needs to have a market price...
    Thank-you so much for the link! It breaks my heart to see living animals like baby chicks being treated like inanimate vegetables on a conveyer belt.

    I know that makes me livid to think that everything seems to have its price but I'm not surprised. They put a price on everything: water to live, human life, and all other animal life. It's inherently wrong and we as a species have no right doing so.
    The good man is the friend of all living things. -- Mohandas Gandhi

  11. #11
    Hemlock's Avatar
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    Default Re: Watch what you eat, if you dare

    I'm so furious - those chicks are just babies - not OBJECTS How sick has society become?
    Silent but deadly :p

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