Food, Inc. is a documentary film directed by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Robert Kenner. The film is loosely based on Eric Schlosser's 2001 non-fiction book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal and The Omnivore's Dilemma written by Michael Pollan.

The film exposes the darker side of the nation’s food industry that the average American consumer may not know about. Our nation has bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, insecticide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli — the harmful bacteria that cause illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults. The voices of Food, Inc. are food experts, farmers, businessmen, government officials and food safety advocates, all of whom have helped to reveal where our food comes from and how it is made. 

The film is divided up into three parts. The first segment examines the industrial production of meat, calling it inhumane and uneconomical. Cows are not designed by evolution to eat corn, they’re designed to eat grass, says the films producer Michael Pollan. "We feed them corn is because corn is really cheap and corn makes them fat quickly." The industrial food system seeks greater efficiency, but each new step toward efficiency leads to problems, he maintains. "If you take feedlot cattle off their corn diet, give them grass for five days, they will shed eighty percent of the E. coli in their gut," said Pollan who also produced Al Gore's 2006 Academy Award-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

The second part of the film focuses on the industrial production of grains and vegetables, claiming they too are uneconomical and environmentally harmful. “All those snack food calories are the ones that come from the commodity crops, from the wheat, from the corn, and from the soybeans,” Pollan says. "By making those calories really cheap, it’s one of the reasons that the biggest predictor of obesity is income level."

In the film Carole Morison, a chicken farmer from Perdue, MD, brings the filmmakers inside a chicken farm so audiences can see firsthand what antibiotics and high-tech breeding are doing to the nation’s chickens. It used to take a chick three months to grow into adulthood, but with the chemicals put into the feed by the big industrialized food companies, the chicks grow in only 45 days and develop oversized breasts. Morison shows how it has affected the chickens – some of the chickens can no longer stand and die before they are brought to market.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000, but the image that’s used to sell the food … you go into the supermarket and you see pictures of farmers. The picket fence and the silo and the 1930s farmhouse and the green grass. The reality is – it’s not a farm, it’s a factory. That meat is being processed by huge multi-national corporations that have very little to do with ranches and farmers,” Morison adds.

And finally, the film delves into the power of the major food companies, and how the heavy use of petroleum-based chemicals (pesticides and fertilizers) contribute to the unhealthy food habits of the American public. "You look at the labels and you see farmer this, farmer that. It’s really just three or four companies that are controlling the meat. We’ve never had food companies this big and this powerful in our history.” adds Schlosser, whose book was serialized by Rolling Stone magazine in 1999.

The film opened June 12th in limited release, but will open nationwide June 19th.