OUR DAILY BREAD
One of two intelligent, well-crafted food documentaries to come from Austria in 2005, Our Daily Bread is a wordless and poetic look at the mechanisms of the modern food-supply industry. The barrage of images—swooping crop dusters reminiscent of North by Northwest and bright yellow chicks spinning out of something resembling a luggage carousel—ebb and flow to a sound track of industrial ambience. It's surprising, insightful, at times ominous, but never less than arresting.
THE FILMS OF LES BLANK
Documentary pioneer Les Blank has more than 30 films to his credit, a handful of which focus on his lifelong fascination with food, including Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, Chulas Fronteras, and the infamous Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (pictured), a 22-minute film of Alice Waters and maverick film director Herzog preparing a of leather boot leather for Herzog's own consumption. Why? He lost a bet, why else?
WE FEED THE WORLD
The second smart Austrian food doc of '05, We Feed the World inspects the origins of our food, the growing distance between food producers and consumers, and how the question of world hunger is tied to everything we eat. Interview subjects range from fishermen and farmers to corporate officers and, in particular, Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
MEAT
Frederick Wiseman's 1976 film profiling the cattle industry is an objective, near-pure document of a (then) modern feeding, slaughtering, and packaging plant. Wiseman focuses the film on the processes and procedures of the plant, leaving viewers to make up their own minds regarding the rights and wrongs occurring on-screen.
I LIKE KILLING FLIES
This shoestring film documents Shopsin's—the recently closed New York institution that featured a menu with over 900 items—as the family owner-operators lose their lease of 32 years and are forced to find a new home. At heart, this funny and touching film is as much a character study of New York as it is a profile of philosopher-chef Kenny Shopsin, the magnetic center of Shopsin's, who waxes with gritty eloquence on issues both big (life, sex, death) and small (insect termination).
WORKINGMAN'S DEATH
This grand, at times graphic, film focuses on six of the most grueling professions imaginable, including illegal coal mining in Ukraine and steelworking in China, but it's the brutality of a Nigerian slaughterhouse that startles and hypnotizes most. The opposite of the industrialized food production studied in films like We Feed the World and Our Daily Bread, it offers an unforgiving look at a reality of the food supply that most of us are debatably far too removed from.
THE REAL DIRT ON FARMER JOHN
A surprising film about eccentric Illinois farmer John Peterson and the family farm that he loved, nearly lost, and finally resurrected as a community-supported organic enterprise. It's as much the story of Peterson's unique journey and buoyant redemption as of farming in American over the last century.
HUNGRY FOR PROFIT
A clearheaded and moving film made about the rise of global agribusiness and the disturbing effects of first-world economic concerns on the third-world food supply. Produced in 1985, Hungry for Profit has aged some, but many of the issues investigated remain at the core of the global hunger debate.
THE GLEANERS AND I
French filmmaker Angès Varda's 2000 documentary focuses on "gleaners" who travel the French countryside, scavenging freshly harvested crop fields for fruits and vegetables. It's a gauzy essay that touches upon issues of class, consumerism, and environmentalism, and the idea of "gleaning" seems not only to fuse with the act of the film being produced but to stretch into your own life long after the film is over.
SUPER SIZE ME
The brand of guerrilla journalism practiced by Morgan Spurlock (see also: Michael Moore) may taint some viewers' experience of Super Size Me, but there's no denying the power of the film's argument or the ability it had to focus the nation's attention on the very real dangers at the heart of the fast-food industry.
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