– the follow-up documentary to 2008’s Food, Inc, narrated by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser – scientists share what they have recently discovered about. They are not just bad for you in a trashy, empty-calories kind of way; they interfere with the brain and the body’s ability to process food; they mess with you on a cellular level. Whole populations are seeing health deteriorate, profoundly, for no purpose beyond profit.
While grandmas, Pollan and Schlosser have been on to junk food since for ever, “that had no scientific meaning”, Pollan says. The gamechanger was Carlos Monteiro, a professor of nutrition at the University of São Paulo, who appears in the new documentary. “He labelled and defined ultra-processed food,” says Pollan. “Processed food you could make at home.
“This is such a weird idea for Americans. We live in abundance. Our supermarkets are cornucopias. We used to look at videos of empty shelves in the Soviet Union and feel self-satisfied. Suddenly, it was happening here. And for very similar reasons: an overly centralised system that didn’t have any redundancy built into it.”At the same time, in the early days of the virus, pigs were being euthanised in jaw-dropping numbers, because they couldn’t be processed due to lockdowns.
There is no doubt that food as it is produced is as harmful to health as tobacco, but there is a question mark over whether that sea change – where cigarette giants were forced to take responsibility for their products – would be possible now, when corporations seem so much more powerful and better defended.