5 Films That Will Change the Way You Look at Food

‘Fast Food Nation’

Based on Eric Schlosser’s book of the same name, Fast Food Nation interweaves three stories depicting different aspects of the big food industry: a restaurant-chain executive, Mexican immigrant workers in a meat processing factory, and a teenage fast-food worker. Directed by Richard Linklater, the film features Greg Kinnear, Ethan Hawke, and Paul Dano.

(Photo: Fast Food Nation/YouTube)

‘Food Beware’

Though filmmaker Jean-Paul Jaud throws in scary statistics about pesticides and cancer rates, Food Beware is lighter and cheerier than most food documentaries. It zooms in on the French village of Barjac, where schools are required to serve students only locally grown organic food. Locals are shown at a town hall meeting debating whether concern over chemicals is exaggerated, but at the end of the day they seem to concede that going organic might be good for the kids.

(Photo: First Run Features)

‘Calorie Detective’

Food labels, including calorie counts, are often unreliable. That’s what filmmaker Casey Neistat discovered in a small experiment in which he enlisted the help of food scientists to test their accuracy. In this six-minute short, a muffin, a tofu sandwich, a Subway sandwich, a Starbucks Frappuccino, and a Chipotle burrito fail the test. Though the Department of Health of New York City, where Neistat filmed the short, requires most chains to list calorie content on menus, nobody verifies the numbers. Same goes for packaged food.

(Photo: Calorie Detective/'The New York Times')

10 Freaky Frankenfruits and Veggies

A video that made the rounds in July shows Neil deGrasse Tyson addressing critics of genetically modified food: “List all the fruits and vegetables. Ask yourself, ‘Is there a wild counterpart to this?’ If there is, it’s not as large, it’s not as sweet, it’s not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it.”

As scientists such as deGrasse Tyson have pointed out, crops have been modified for thousands of years. But some fruits and vegetables aren’t just engineered for eaters put off by seed picking. These hybrids combine the most appealing qualities of two crops. Click through for 10 of the oddest fruit and vegetable crossbreeds.

People get heated about food, and not just because everyone eats. It’s at the center of all sorts of issues, including the environment, health, labor conditions, and class disparity. So it’s no wonder that when Super Size Me and Food, Inc. came out, they struck a chord with many Americans. From a six-minute short to full-length documentaries to a comedy-drama, here are five films that examine the far-reaching issue of food.

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5 Films That Will Change the Way You Look at Food

Movies that everyone from the obsessive calorie counter to the organic cooking fanatic needs to see.

‘Fast Food Nation’

‘Food Beware’

‘Fed Up’

‘Calorie Detective’

‘The Harvest’ (‘La Cosecha’)

10 Freaky Frankenfruits and Veggies