‘Food, Inc. 2’ Premieres At Telluride, Follow Up To Hugely Successful Documentary On Our Broken Food System
04.09.2023 - 23:53
/ deadline.com
Hollywood loves sequels, but in the nonfiction space it’s rare for a documentary to get a follow up. However, 15 years after Food, Inc. landed with huge impact, the sequel Food, Inc. 2 premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, bringing a fresh perspective on America’s spoiled food system.
“All of us swore we would never go to this area again,” said Robert Kenner, director of the original Food, Inc. He co-directed Participant’s Food, Inc. 2 with Melissa Robledo, a co-producer on the first film. “But I think on some levels this became such an important story to go tell that we all felt we needed to come back and we could talk about it in sort of stronger terms than we did [before].”
The catalyst for the sequel became the pandemic, which exposed the vulnerabilities of a food system dominated by a handful of massive agribusiness companies including Cargill, ADM, and Tyson Foods.
“When you get a system that is so hyper-efficient, it also becomes very brittle and it can’t withstand shocks,” author Michael Pollan, a producer on Food, Inc. 2 and a special consultant on the orginal, told Deadline in Telluride. “We were seeing farmers throwing out tremendous amounts of food, euthanizing pigs, spilling milk on the ground at the same time supermarket shelves were empty. And how could those two things go together?”
The lumbering giants of ag business were too clumsy to adjust, the filmmakers say. What those companies did have going for them was immense power in Washington. That became evident after meat packing plants turned into Covid super spreaders. When local authorities in Waterloo, Iowa tried to pause production at a Tyson Foods plant in response to a Covid outbreak, company chairman John Tyson had other ideas. He wrote a