If you eat any food at all then Food Inc. is pretty essential viewing. Filmmaker Robert Kenner "lifts the veil on America's food industry", and sheds a great deal of light on the impacts of industrialized agriculture.

What Food Inc very successfully highlights is that the American food industry (and presumably ours too) is in a terrible place. Quite simply, we know nothing about what we eat, how it's farmed or any of the rather unsettling steps that our food takes before it gets to us. There is a great deal of information that is extremely well hidden from consumers.

And it's not surprising really, because would you really want to eat a hamburger knowing that the meat has been bleached with ammonia to get rid of the E.coli that forms in the cows stomachs because they are forced to eat corn and not grass. NO, YOU FUCKING WELL WOULD NOT.

We're fed an image of our food coming from these quaint little farms while in reality, these farms are actually factories. Factories that are highly mechanized in order to produce vastly greater numbers than ever before.

Did you know that approximately 10 billion animals (chickens, cattle, hogs, ducks, turkeys, lambs and sheep) are raised and killed in the US annually? Or that nearly all of them are raised on factory farms under inhumane conditions? No, neither did I until I stepped into ACMI last night.

The documentary details how the American food supply is controlled by a small handful of multi-national corporations that clearly put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and the environment as a whole. It's tragic. It's all about the science and technology of it and is becoming further and further removed from what nature intended. Chickens are made to be bigger-breasted, soybean seeds have been modified to become herbicide-resistant, and most fruit and vegetables don't even have seasons anymore, they're made to grow all year round.

We have disrupted and severely interfered with the flow of nature and are now seeing the consequences. As a society, we are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Food Inc. is a well produced documentary that forms a very compelling argument, one that will hopefully make you hungry for change.

Here's the trailer: