‘Food, Inc. 2’ Creators on Why a Sequel to 2008’s Big Ag Exposé Was Necessary: “It’s Really Sad to See Things Get Worse”

Food, Inc. 2 follows the golden rule of Hollywood sequels: The second time around, the villain must be scarier and the death count higher. Directors Melissa Robledo and Robert Kenner’s 2008 documentary Food, Inc. helped spark a national conversation about the devastating economic, environmental and health effects of our industrialized food system, and built momentum for serious reform. They never intended to direct a follow-up. But since then, Big Ag has fought back, and by some measures the problems caused by corporate consolidation have only gotten worse.

Journalists Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), who co-narrated the first film, became famous for exposing the deep dysfunction of America’s food industry. They’ve since followed their curiosity to other realms — psychedelics for Pollan, for example, and nuclear warfare for Schlosser. But 16 years after the release of Food Inc., they’ve reteamed with the directors for the sequel, this time as co-producers. (Food, Inc. 2 was released in theaters this week by Magnolia Pictures.)

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The film is intended as a call to arms, ending with an invitation to visit a website where viewers outraged by what they’ve just seen can find links to take action. But Pollan and Schlosser see it fundamentally as a work of journalism, in the grand American tradition of Upton Sinclair, whose reported novel The Jungle helped expose the horrors of the meatpacking industry at the dawn of the 20th century. “I don’t think either of us are Marxist-Leninist socialists trying to overthrow the capitalist system,” said Schlosser. “If anything, we’re opposing a form of corporate socialism in which the government has been co-opted by these corporations. And the business costs” — e.g. farm subsidies, and health care costs associated with increased obesity and diabetes — “are being imposed on us. We’ve socialized the cost incurred by these companies and we privatized the profit. And that is classic market failure.”

By going up against such powerful interests, Schlosser says he and Pollan have put a target on their backs: “After the release of Food, Inc.,” he says, “I was told by a very good source that one of the big agribusiness companies had hired a private investigation firm to investigate us and not just go through our credit history, but also was running agents to investigate us. I’m not planning to accept any drinks from strangers.”

What has happened in the food industry over the past 16 years that warranted a sequel? 

Eric Schlosser: Michael and I have spent decades on these issues. It’s really sad to see things get worse in certain respects. For well-educated, upper-income people, I think there’s a whole new food system that’s providing sustainable, healthy food. But for the mass of Americans, the highly processed diet and the obesity rate are just growing. My reentry into this whole subject of food was through what’s happened with meatpacking workers, because I wrote about that in Fast Food Nation. I went into a meatpacking plant 27 years ago, to see how bad the conditions were. And talk about the bad guys getting worse: [Back then] I interviewed hundreds and hundreds of meatpacking workers, I interviewed people who had lost arms, I interviewed people who had been severely injured. But I never heard of a single case of child labor. And that’s not in the film, but The New York Times has done an amazing series of articles about it. And now the Justice Department is investigating it. And it’s endemic. I mean, it’s not just one plant. It’s plants throughout the United States. And to me, that’s just a really good symbol of how unchecked corporate power will do what it wants to do to make money unless we stand up to it.

Michael Pollan: As Eric said, in many ways things have gotten worse. And, and this is something of a surprise. I think there was a moment of great hope in 2008 around the food system. And there was definitely increasing awareness about how things worked, and a lot of support for alternatives. And while it’s true that this alternative food market that has been created since then is full of hope — and in general is more available to people with disposable income than others — it’s also been a boon to farmers. It’s created new markets, and reduced some farmers’ dependence on this rigged marketplace and allowed a lot of farmers to go direct to consumers or close to that. When we began, we had a lot of hope, but there was some naiveté that voting with your fork could fix the problem. It did something — it created a $50 billion plus marketplace, for organic food for local food for CSAs. But until you address the corporations and the market failures in food, you’re not going to have a truly just food system.

But as dark as some of these issues are, there’s some hope here, too. And I would point to two things in this film that I think are really important. Back in 2008, the food movement did not have any powerful allies in the U.S. Congress. It had a couple of congresspeople, representatives, but no one of the stature of [Senators] John Tester or Cory Booker [who appear in Food, Inc. 2]. These are people who specifically recognize the dangers of consolidation, and how the consolidated food market is damaging both farmers and ranchers on one side, and consumers and eaters on the other side. So that gives me hope.

Eric, the film shows clips of your testimony before the Senate. You’ve both been involved in fighting for change in this industry. How much of your work is storytelling and how much of it is activism?

Pollan: Once you have delved into a subject as a journalist, once you’ve figured out how the system works and what’s wrong with it, it’s very hard not to find yourself turning into an activist. And that’s definitely happened to me around the food issue. And to some extent around what’s going on in the psychedelic realm. At a certain point, it’s disingenuous to suggest you have no opinion or you form no convictions. And it’s one of the reasons I don’t really write that much about food anymore. At least in the pages of newspapers. I’m comfortable in that role, but this is a work of journalism.

Schlosser: When I was growing up, the writers who I really admired were writers who were really engaged in society and really engaged in the big issues of the day.

It’s discouraging when you think that Upton Sinclair wrote about the nightmarish nature of the meatpacking sector, what, 100 years ago? 

Pollan: More, yeah. It was 1906.

Is it fair to say that things have only gotten worse in the meat industry since then?

Schlosser: What’s really important to keep in mind is that things got better. If you were to go in a time machine back to the 1960s to be a meatpacking worker, it was a difficult job, but it was a solidly middle-class job. And the wages for meatpacking workers in the 1960s and 1970s, if you adjust them for inflation, are much higher than today. In some cases, it would be $30 to $40 an hour. These were union jobs. There were waiting lists to get jobs at American meatpacking plants. And a lot of the history that Michael and I have chronicled is about the dismantling of that food system. You know, the big meat packers controlled like 20 percent of the market for beef in the 1970s. And now they control over 80 percent and once these companies get really big and powerful, they can cut wages, break unions, get the prices they want from farmers and growers. So, you know, the Upton Sinclair story had a happy ending until it didn’t. There would be no point in doing any of this work if all is lost anyway. I would be competing with Michael to write books about great beaches in Polynesia. But to get engaged in these issues is to believe things don’t have to be this way. And that, as journalists or filmmakers, we can be part of the process of changing.

Michael, it’s clear you believe that a lot of the proposed technological solutions to these problems — whether it’s cultured meat or other innovations like the Impossible Burger — offer a false promise.

Pollan: These are important developments. They point to a different future. But they have huge problems. The synthetic meat world has the potential to shrink this brutal meat economy, which we need to do for many reasons, not least of which is climate change. On the other hand, they’re selling an ultra-processed food product with ingredients that have never been in the human diet. So I’m of two minds about it. We tried to kind of balance that. And then the cell-cultured meat is an interesting idea in that it would be real meat. But it turns out that has issues too, and it’s going to be very difficult to scale, if not impossible. Cell-based meat is going to be available to consumers soon. Synthetic meat is already available to consumers. And it’s worth noting, too, that the players are kind of the same people as we’ve seen before. It’s a case of large food companies wanting to cover their bets about the future.

In what way have you both changed your diets as a result of your reporting?

Pollan: Well, I don’t eat meat from factory farms. Like Eric, I’ve spent time in these places. Nothing would shrink the American appetite for meat more quickly than if more people could visit feedlots, or kill floors in a slaughterhouse. I’ve had the privilege of doing that. And as a result, my meat-eating is very constrained. In fact, I eat very little of it. Eric?

Schlosser: My diet really hasn’t changed that much, except I’m more conscious about where things are sourced. Like, Michael, I will not spend a penny for the big meatpacking companies. We’ve lived with livestock for millennia, but it’s only in the last 30 years that we’ve treated them this way. Americans ate poultry, and they ate pork, and they ate beef since the founding of this country, but it’s only in the last 40 years, that these animals have been raised in these mega, mega factory farms. And I think if somebody were to land from outer space and see what we’re doing to sentient creatures, it’s just, it’s unbelievable. I’m so far from being perfect, and so far from being pure, but I really try not to give my money to the companies that are causing so much harm to people, to the environment, to the land. These companies can produce really cheap meat through factory farming, but only by the narrowest of measures. If these companies were forced to assume the business costs that they’re causing on the environment, pollution, waterways, antibiotic resistance … It’s hugely inefficient.

How did the reaction to the first film shape your approach to the second? 

Pollan: The first film sparked a powerful counter-movement in the industry. That hadn’t existed. After Omnivore’s Dilemma, there wasn’t a powerful reaction from the industry. If you were writing about food between like 2002 and 2006, when Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, the Eastern elite media was all on one side about these food issues, it was basically pro-reform in a big way. After 2008 [following the release of Food, Inc.] the industry organized a counter-offensive. The Farm Bureau, in particular, sent legions of people to editorial boards to argue for getting their point of view in, whether it was about GMOs, or whatever it was. And they were effective in many ways. I think the debate shifted after this last film. I think the industry took note of it. We’ll see what happens this time. We’ll be better prepared.

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