Food Inc. Doc.

Fast Food Nation, the best-selling book by Eric Schlosser, exposed the seamy side of the all-American meal. A documentary follow-up of sorts, Food Inc., goes further back in the food chain to show how animals are raised in squalor, slaughtered en masse, bathed in ammonia and served to us with a "Farm fresh" label. Let's just say brands like Tyson, Perdue and Smithfield don't fare so well in this independent film, opening in New York and Los Angeles on June 12 from Magnolia Pictures.

The companies' advertising can try to keep spinning the pastoral fantasy, but anyone who sees this film won't be swallowing that notion anymore. (None of the marketers, who control the majority of food production in the U.S., would appear in the doc.) Monsanto, the chemical company responsible for Agent Orange, might take it on the chin the hardest, as filmmaker Robert Kenner follows the plight of some small farmers who dared to stand up to the DDT-maker-turned-agribusiness. Guess how that turned out?

Yes, yes. Meat is murder... However, the other side of this coin is whether anyone bothered to ask "Why?" Why has food become mechanized? "Evil?" What are the end results? Are people eating and not starving? Are we past subsistence farming - and how much more? Are fewer people needed to toil the land to feed the rest of us so that we can all concentrate on stepping up the grand Maslow's Pyramid? It may have become more about marketplace and greed, but the original goal was to modernize the business of agriculture.

And, correct me if you can find other evidence, wasn't the entire Industrial Revolution was based upon making our lives toiling in the agrarian industry just a little easier?

Perhaps there's a middle ground of discovering how your food is made and shrink wrapped, and what alternatives we might have - and also a frank discussion of costs. Would beef be a couple hundred dollars a pound if it was all free range grass feed in the great state of Oklahoma and walked to the Chicago slaughter houses like in 'the good-ole days?' How many people in the inner cities would die of starvation because a hand full of people didn't like the industrial process that chops the heads off of live chickens and then turns them into nuggets? Must we all grow vegetables on top of our garages and edible flowers in our front yards while we recycle our urine into dandelion wine? Isn't that the same kind of intolerance that you'd expect from that guy listening to Rush Limbaugh holding up the line at the KFC drive thru window? I'm all for a change - but let's be realistic about it.

What's the end game, and what is the compromise? You tell me?