Our Daily Bread

Saw Our Daily Bread, a documentary about the industrial food industry. As you might guess from the title and subject matter, it does get a bit moralistic sometimes, but it's not too heavy-handed. Rather, it evokes the Quatsi films of Godfrey Reggio, being wordless and composed almost entirely of composed still shots and slow zooms and pans. The thesis-making shot of the film, I feel, is the one from the poster. A man in a lab coat is standing in a hallway of what could be refrigerators or airlocks to deep space. He moves a cart larger than he is into frame. We know it must contain something edible, but don't know what. Corn? Bread? No, it's baby chicks. The adorable and ambulatory are treated no differently than, say, a pile of laundry. Just another thing to transport and put through some process. They aren't shown (right now) being beheaded or having their wings clipped or any other discomfort, but they are being treated with supreme and absolute indifference. Fair warning if you're sensitive about this sort of thing: I'm going to talk about meat production.

The scene with the chicks is immediately followed by a crop duster eerily unfolding its arms, getting longer and longer, like a praying mantis. Later on, we are in a salt mine which is vast, dark, and echoing, looking more like the moon than like anything terrestrial. There are machines with pseudopod-like appendages which are designed to shake the nuts off of trees. This is a world of robots and arcane design. A world so seemingly alien that questions of compassion or humanity seem irrelevant. Human workers are often shown, often eating on a lunch break. This is thematic but also renders the humans almost as automatic as the machinery that surrounds them. They are just more expensive machines.

I was totally fascinated with the bizarre machinery and techniques of mass, automated butchery. At one point a human is sucking viscera out of a pig's corpse using a vacuum cleaner. At one point fish are being gutted by a machine with the precise movements of an insect or a bird. It's fascinating but of course it's discomforting and repulsive to watch as well. Indeed, in one scene we see a cow fight very earnestly to not be killed, but is doomed, has of course been doomed since birth. The film is really best suited to starting discussions, I think. The meat production will stick with you the longest and is course very unsettling but there's also wax papers, cucumbers, and even a funny little scene where a worker is walking down a row of egg-laying hens, their heads peering out at him and pulling back en masse when he moves his hands towards them. There's also the workers themselves and a discussion of globalism to be had. Notice how they're never eating the food they're producing. I wonder also if there is meant to be a parallel drawn here between the workers and the animals? At any rate a very interesting film if you're willing to put up with some blood.