Food, Inc.

• Exposes the safety of our food supply
• Celebrity Public Announcements
• "You are what you eat."- ABC News Special Feature
• The dying livihood of the farmer because of Corporations
• Reveals how the food industry is controlled by a handful of corporations

Overworked Manhattan coffee shop waitress Bella isn't looking forward to her 35th birthday. Stuck in a relationship with a married man for far too long, Bella takes a chance on frustrated novelist/taxi driver Bruno. Determined not to scare yet another man off with her dreams of marriage and family, Bella plays it cool and tells Bruno she hates children. A tough break for the womanizer since his ex-wife has just dumped two small children on him ... In her coffee shop world, Bella witnesses she's not alone in the bittersweet battle against romance's difficulties. Shy widower Paul struggles through the tender courtship ! of lively widow Emily. Ornery old Seymour gets a magical shot of youth when he falls for a sexy exotic dancer. Despite love's accompanying twists and turns, everyone holds out for the best. And the persistent Bella discovers fairy tales can come true...even in New York City. Louise Lasser and Robert Modicka put their hearts into the story of a 60-ish couple trying to make a go of it, regardless of his friends' ridicule and her low self-esteem. Their honest acting nearly gives this failed attempt at a Woody Allen-style episode of Friends needed humanity. The problem? Lasser and Modicka are not the lead actors in this film, whose tritely punning title is about the extent of writer-director Amos Kollek's wit. Anna Thomson is the ostensible heroine in this story about the denizens of a New York City diner and their romantic travails. The 35-year-old waitress, unlucky in life and love, seems such a candidate for long-term therapy that her unconventional outlook isn't so m! uch profoundly sympathetic as simply pathetic. Kollek also str! etches c redulity by allowing a sex-show performer to melt at the badgering appearances of one of her "clients," the creepiest of the whole lot. --Kevin FilipskiIn the period between 1200 and 1500 in western Europe, a number of religious women gained widespread veneration and even canonization as saints for their extraordinary devotion to the Christian eucharist, supernatural multiplications of food and drink, and miracles of bodily manipulation, including stigmata and inedia (living without eating). The occurrence of such phenomena sheds much light on the nature of medieval society and medieval religion. It also forms a chapter in the history of women.
Previous scholars have occasionally noted the various phenomena in isolation from each other and have sometimes applied modern medical or psychological theories to them. Using materials based on saints' lives and the religious and mystical writings of medieval women and men, Caroline Walker Bynum uncovers the pattern lying ! behind these aspects of women's religiosity and behind the fascination men and women felt for such miracles and devotional practices. She argues that food lies at the heart of much of women's piety. Women renounced ordinary food through fasting in order to prepare for receiving extraordinary food in the eucharist. They also offered themselves as food in miracles of feeding and bodily manipulation.
Providing both functionalist and phenomenological explanations, Bynum explores the ways in which food practices enabled women to exert control within the family and to define their religious vocations. She also describes what women meant by seeing their own bodies and God's body as food and what men meant when they too associated women with food and flesh. The author's interpretation of women's piety offers a new view of the nature of medieval asceticism and, drawing upon both anthropology and feminist theory, she illuminates the distinctive features of women's use of symbols.! Rejecting presentist interpretations of women as exploited or! masochi stic, she shows the power and creativity of women's writing and women's lives.From the filmmakers of Academy Awardr Winner An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc. lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing how our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. Food, Inc. reveals surprising - and often shocking truths - about what we eat, how it's produced and who we have become as a nation. You'll never look at dinner the same way again.For most Americans, the ideal meal is fast, cheap, and tasty. Food, Inc. examines the costs of putting value and convenience over nutrition and environmental impact. Director Robert Kenner explores the subject from all angles, talking to authors, advocates, farmers, and CEOs, like co-producer Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma), Gary Hirschberg (Stonyfield Farms), and Barbara Kowalcyk, who's been lobbying for more rigorous standards since E. coli claimed the life of her two-year-old son. The filmmaker takes his camera into slaughterhouses and factory farms where chickens grow too fast to walk properly, cows eat feed pumped with toxic chemicals, and illegal immigrants risk life and limb to bring these products to market at an affordable cost. If eco-docs tends to preach to the converted, Kenner presents his findings in such an engaging fashion that Food, Inc. may well reach the very viewers who could benefit from it the most: harried workers who don't have the time or income to read every book and eat non-genetically modified produce every day. Though he covers some of the same ground as Super-Size Me and King Corn, Food Inc. presents a broader picture of the problem, and if Kenner takes an understandably tough stance on particular politicians and corporations, he's j! ust as quick to praise those who are trying to be responsible-! -even Wa l-Mart, which now carries organic products. That development may have more to do with economics than empathy, but the consumer still benefits, and every little bit counts. --Kathleen C. Fennessy