Movie - Our Daily Bread

My husband and I had a chance to view this really interesting movie earlier this week. It is titled Our Daily Bread. The movie, produced in Germany, had no sound track and no narrator. It let the sounds of the food production speak for itself: the whirs and clicks of the machines moving food along conveyor belts and the soft murmur of the workers as they go about their daily jobs. It was a very interesting look at industrial food production and high-tech farming. So high-tech that the some vegetables were never “subjected” to rain or other outside elements. The vegetables were raised in green houses, sprayed frequently with pesticides and fertilizer and who knows what else. The magnitude of scale of the green houses only became apparent as the camera, focused on a person outside a green house, zoomed out repeatedly until the person could no longer be seen.

There was far less blood and gore than I expected. I knew the movie dealt not only with vegetables, but also with the meat that is processed so I expected, and braced myself for it. I, and other Americans, may have become immune to the sight of such things because of television. But I have to wonder if my conception of slaughter houses has been twisted by the word “slaughter”.

Interesting scenes:

• Two men chat as they descend down, down, down, down deep into the earth and then drive underground for a long way. Anticipation grew. What were they going down to process, I tried to guess? Mushrooms? No, salt. Deep in the earth they were in a huge salt mine. The producers again did the zoom out trick. You think you are looking at a small pile of rock salt until the camera zooms out and you see this massive machine scoping up the rock.
• Funniest scene – watching workers shake an olive tree to knock the olives off.
• Saddest scene – really, any that had to do with chickens. Beginning when they are just chicks being scooped up, sorted and placed on conveyor belts to move them along and then later when they are full grown watching them being scooped or vacuumed up and deposited in crates. The workers did not appear to be unnecessarily rough but the birds were treated as objects rather than living things.
• Most disturbing scene – a meat handler moving meat along and then taking out his cell phone to answer a call. Yuck, yuck and double yuck!