Freshlife, Community Arts Center pair up to present Food, Inc.

We have been nothing short of amazed by the reader reactions to last month’s edition of Options, in which we tackled the very controversial, vast and confusing topic of genetically modified foods, and how they affect us as families and as a nation.

We were worried the science may have bored readers, or that you might have wished we would just get off the soap box. What we heard was just the opposite. You loved the edition, and you want more.

You’re in luck. This month, in major cities across the United States, the movie Food, Inc. tackles this very issue. As soon as we read about the movie, we knew we would do whatever we needed to get the movie to Williamsport’s Community Arts Center. As things that are meant to be often are, that was an incredibly easy task.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. 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. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

We hope you’ll join us in viewing this incredible take on the state of America’s food industry.