One of my favorite scenes in Food, Inc. is the one in which “grass farmer” Joel Salatin is volubly rebutting all the arguments against local food as he disembowels dozens of chickens in his open-air slaughtering station at Polyface Farm. He’s just finished explaining how the USDA tried to shut him down for doing this in the open air, which would, USDA inspectors say, expose the chicken to all sorts of contaminants.

“Can you imagine?” asks a dumbfounded Salatin.

Salatin is such a fantastic character—outspoken, independent-minded, and so clearly in love with his work and the land—that my guess is that filmmaker Robert Kenner decided to make this movie after meeting him. As Michael Pollan has written in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Salatin is evangelical about his “beyond organic” farm—where the cows graze on pasture, the chickens then graze on the cow’s patties for grubs and larvae (spreading the manure in the process), producing nutritionally dense, tasty eggs as a result. Salatin forms the centerpiece of Pollan’s meditation on the “Pastoral,” and he is, in may ways, the hero of Food, Inc., too, offering up a new model for farmers such as Carole Morison who are burnt out and fed up with working within the industrial system.

Manhola Dargis found Food, Inc. scary—I just found it sad. I cried (as did many others in the theatre, I noticed) when safe-food activist Barbara Kowalcyk told the story of how her two-year-old son died twelve days after eating a hamburger that had been contaminated by e. coli. I teared up when the eldest daughter in a struggling Mexican-American family—one that typically eats at McDonald’s but is trying to eat healthier on a limited budget—tells her excited sister to put the pears back at the grocery store because they cost too much per pound. And I got a lump in my throat as Moe Parr, a “seed-cleaner” from Indiana who was sued by Monsanto for allegedly encouraging farmers to save seeds (instead of buying Monsanto’s GMO patented seeds), was forced to divulge which of his customers had saved seeds to the company’s evil lawyers.

As the credits start to roll, Bruce Springteen sings “This Land is Your Land,” and a series of steps you can take blip across the screen (”You can change the world with every bite!“)—much as they do at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth.” I know the personal is political, but rather than inspire me, this list only served to make me more dejected. The horrors of our industrial food system are not going to be banished by our personal habits alone.

Yet, encouragingly, the movie, like a modern-day version of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, has already pissed off the meat and poultry industry and Monsanto alike. The just-launched anti-Food Inc. web site has lengthy rebuttals to all of the movie’s main points. (Sample hypothetical question: Can we feed the world using Joel Salatin’s approach? Answer (in part): Americans purchase 35 billion pounds of chicken per year. To suggest that this tremendous demand could be met by small-scale farming with labor- and energy-intensive methods is simply a fantasy.)

Monsanto, too, has produced a web site that counters much of what was in the film, saying it “demonizes American farmers” and is “one-sided and biased.” Here is La Vida Locavore’s Jill Richardson’s spirited reply.

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