There is a documentary on More 4 at 10pm on Tuesday night called Our Daily Bread. It sounds like is taking a very negative stance on modern food production. The irony is, however, is no supermarket would touch produce from the sort of farm that the writer onbiously yearns to see...
Tues 29 April 2008 10pm
This beautiful and evocative documentary is a powerful look at the industry of agriculture throughout Europe.
There might not be anything new about the idea that "you are what you eat", but the old maxim seems particularly urgent at the moment. Since the turn of the millennium the issues of food production and sustainability have become ever more serious. We're all increasingly aware of the potential dangers of fast food, the polluting effects of intensive agriculture and pressures on global food supply and our appetite for information about exactly what we are putting on our plates and the impact of our feeding habits has grown accordingly.
Documentaries like Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation have done a lot to answer that craving, but Our Daily Bread proves there's still room for more - and more than one way to approach the issue. In contrast to Morgan Spurlock and Richard Linklater's fast-talking, hard hitting agit-prop this is a languorous, wordless look at the food industry that offers no judgements or opinions, but is every bit as effective in provoking outrage.
A strange, complex automated world
Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter has elected to let his camera do the talking. Shooting on high definition video in various farms, slaughterhouses and food processing plants around Europe and using long, slow and panoramic tracking and crane shots that wouldn't feel out of place on 2001: A Space Odyssey he simply shows the viewer various stages in food production, from artificial insemination of cattle stock to abattoirs, via gigantic tomato greenhouses and acres and acres of lurid green asparagus. Most of the images wouldn't look out of place in a science-fiction film either.
Geyrhalter reveals a strange, complex automated world, generally illuminated by discomforting artificial lights and full of strange technology. Computers flicker as a bull is brought in to have its seed captured in a stainless steel room; thousands and thousands of chicks roll past on conveyor belts; salmon are sucked out of the water with a huge vacuum and then chopped up and eviscerated within seconds by a machine whose complexity would baffle our ancestors.
Fascinating and oddly beautiful
With its stately pace, beautifully composed shots and silence punctuated only by the thrumming of machines, and occasional cheeps, moos and low-level animal noises the film becomes almost meditative, like an agricultural version of Godfrey Reggio's arthouse classic Koyaanisqatsi.
Cogs in the wheel
It's only when you step back to consider that all of these strange looking machines, monotonous landscapes and gleaming lifeless factories actually directly relate to our lives and the food we eat every day that it becomes disturbing. Especially when the humans who work in these environments are brought into the picture. We see them dwarfed by the implements around them, bathed in strange greenish light in salt mines, zoned out and smoking silently during their breaks, murmuring silently as a bus takes them to an unspecified location to gather endless bunches of asparagus and carving up pigs corpses with gigantic cutters. No matter what they are doing they just seem like cogs in the machine – skilful at their work, but drained of independence and life.
How do you view modern farming techniques?
The view Our Daily Bread presents seems a very long way from the romantic small-holding ideal and the notion that we can have any real affinity with modern farming techniques.
The cumulative effect of the images Geyrhalter presents is unsettling, to say the least. A few of the shots are immediately disturbing: pigs packed so close together they can't even stand up; cows being taken to their deaths on a production line basis in something that looks more like a car factory than anything relating to living, breathing creatures; those uncountable numbers of cute chicks on conveyor belts. Most, however, they rely on a more subtle analysis from the viewer.
Without ever preaching Geyrhalter leads us to question whether we are really comfortable with the way our food is sourced, whether we really understand the environmental costs, if such practices are necessary sacrifices t convenience and cost-cutting, and if there might be alternatives.
Whatever conclusions you draw, one thing is certain: by the time you've sat through to the final scene you'll never look at your food in quite the same way again.