By RICHARD  BERMAN

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BERMAN ON OFFENSE

Richard Berman

(Sept. 21, 2009) There’s been a lot of buzz about the food industry recently, and the noise hasn’t been good. “Food, Inc.,” the new “exposé” documentary about food production and the American diet, surfaced in theatres this summer. And the consensus is that you won’t be hungry after seeing it.

What director Robert Kenner delivers is 94 minutes of fear-mongering and a plethora of dogmas about nutrition and sustainability.

It’s clear that Kenner doesn’t think highly of “big corporations”—or big anything, for that matter. In the process of watching him denigrate such companies, we get foodie propaganda at its finest: mad food scientists lacing our foods with “artificial chemicals,” newsreel clips of food recalls and a soundtrack that could have come from the latest slasher flick.

According to the film, food producers and restaurants have made eating too affordable and too convenient. As a result, the story goes, Americans are fat, sick and stupid. And “Big Food” is to blame.

The “Food, Inc.” vision of American food policy has been reduced to the kind of “green” gimmickry touted by activist chefs and elitist foodies: more organic foods and an aggressive regulatory crack-down on current industry leaders.

Such dietary elitism is nothing new, but Kenner and his allies—such as journalist Michael Pollan, celebrity chef Alice Waters, and “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser—are taking calls for a “revolution” to the next level.

Activists believe that transforming the food industry will lead to large-scale societal changes on a host of unrelated issues. As dietary scaremonger Marion Nestle recently said: “You can view food as an entry point into the most important issues of society. Food and agriculture are connected to climate change, to employment, to the economy, to people’s health—even to immigration.”

Now more than ever, it’s important to understand that the facts are on our side.

For starters: There is no proof that paying more for organic foods will deliver any health benefit.

Health experts say that pricey organics carry no unique health advantages. A new review released in July by the U.K.’s Food Standards Agency found that organic foods don’t have better nutrition benefits than nonorganic. The study’s lead researcher concluded, “Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.”

The knee-jerk aversion to “pesticides” in the fruits and vegetables our parents fed us also ignores the fact that organic farmers use pesticides too. They’re simply chosen from a different list. Given the lack of oversight on organic farms, there’s no guarantee that those pesticides came from the “right” list at all.

With all the vague talk about “sustainability” in “Food, Inc.,” it’s easy to miss the single-most important point about sustainability: Conventional farming feeds the world’s population. As the Cambridge chemist John Emsley recently concluded about going organic, “The greatest catastrophe that the human race could face this century is not global warming but a global conversion to ‘organic farming’—an estimated 2 billion people would perish.” There simply is not enough available farm land to come close to the organic utopia.

Food, Inc. also tries hard to show consumers as helpless—that poor choices are not their fault. In one scene, a low-income family wanders around a grocery store looking utterly lost. The father is diabetic and the children overweight because they “didn’t know” that a diet consisting entirely of burgers, fries and shakes is unhealthy.

Ultimately, we come away with the clear impression that fast food is “bad” and everything organic is “good.” Kenner hides everything positive about our food system, presumably because such optimism would detract from his vision.

As the popularity of this agitprop film shows, more and more Americans want to know where their food comes from. There are plenty of Robert Kenner types who are jumping at the opportunity to give their version of the story.

Richard Berman is president of Berman & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying firm specializing in research, communications and advertising.

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