Documentary review
Our Daily Bread (Unser täglich Brot, 2005)
When I worked at Drumlin Farm one of the things I never got to do was accompany the livestock to the slaughterhouse. I wanted to understand every kind of animal facility, every relationship between humans and animals. This crucially important part of it, the process by which animals become food, when "livestock" becomes "meat" is hidden from us. Some believe that the disconnect between modern people and their food supply is a serious problem.
Our Daily Bread is an attempt to reconnect modern people with the very odd ways that the food supply comes to be. This odd documentary, with no dialogue or narration, comes from Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and includes scenes shot in plant-processing facilities as well as those for meat. Some of the more fascinating sequences in fact are the harvesting of olives (an amusing combination of low and high tech methods are used) and the cropdusting of a sunflower field (a beautiful scene, though it evokes Silent Spring).
The film was shot in dozens of different locations across Europe. It is hard to imagine it being made in the United States, where the security clearance to enter a chicken farm rivals a military base. In interviews Geyrhalter explains that some facility owners were probably proud to show off their state of the art processes (the fish gutter/vacuumer is inarguably elegant) while others were hesitant to allow access. This movie portrays a fact that has driven many people (myself included, albeit temporarily) to vegetarianism: The pragmatic and efficient handling of food animals is indistinguishable from cruelty.
The handling of chickens seems especially rough: they are always treated as raw material, and never as birds. To treat them even to the standards of lab animals would mean an unacceptable increase of overhead. How are five thousand chickens brought from the feedlot to the processing line? With a riding vacuum cleaner, straight to the super fast conveyer belt, how else? It becomes clear why animal care standards in industrial food production are regulated by government mandate and not through voluntary compliance. At one point I turned to my wife and remarked "I want to pay ten dollars a dozen for eggs from now on."
Interspersed with the footage of the labor being done are scenes of the laborers on breaks, quietly eating their own food before returning to the hard work of providing it for the whole continent. These scenes maintain the pace of the movie, which most audiences will find glacial. It's meant to be taken in slowly, with deep breaths between images, and pauses for reflection. The scale is enormous, with the camera either sitting before a giant arena of food production, or slowly rolling through thousands of meters of stalls, pens, greenhouses, dissembly lines. Gone are the unkempt gory hellholes of Upton Sinclairs Jungle, instead technicians in white Tyvek coveralls hose stainless steel equipment down with an approved disinfectant and water solution.
The most maddening thing about Our Daily Bread is the dearth of actual information provided. Sometimes that makes for a better film: we are surprised to see what the process provides; we are not spoken down to (or spoken to at all) and we do not have our hand held. But the viewer craves a title card, a caption, any indication of setting. "Olive Grove, Spain," or "Lettuce Field, Southern Austria," would suffice. There is a long sequence of men descending, then moving about in, what? A salt mine is the only logical conclusion, but I amused myself by imagining they were harvesting granulated sugar from the sweet rich earth.
The moment that conscious beings dread in the abattoir, the single action that turns an animal into meat and meat by-products, is surprisingly discreet. In most cases we see living animals urged into a chute and then dead animals pulled out the other end. Other times we see the digestive system carefully separated from the rest of the carcass, often in ingenious ways. The workers go about their tasks with efficient nonchalance: attach a chain here, make a cut there, then they are ready for the next one, and the hundred after that. Only in the final moments of the film do we really experience an animal's death. A head of cattle appears in the window of the processing plant, presumably led from an unseen truck. A worker wields the stunning device made famous as a murder weapon in No Country for Old Men expertly and effortlessly. The cow slumps down and the cylindrical chute she was standing in slowly rotates on it's axis, pouring the animal onto the conveyer. Quickly and inevitably another cow appears at the window, but she senses something is wrong and writhes and struggles a moment before the worker finds the right spot on her head with the stunner. Then she goes down and the machine continues.
Links:
Official Website
American Distributor Icarus Films
Olive harvesting clip. (may open automatically)
When I worked at Drumlin Farm one of the things I never got to do was accompany the livestock to the slaughterhouse. I wanted to understand every kind of animal facility, every relationship between humans and animals. This crucially important part of it, the process by which animals become food, when "livestock" becomes "meat" is hidden from us. Some believe that the disconnect between modern people and their food supply is a serious problem.
Our Daily Bread is an attempt to reconnect modern people with the very odd ways that the food supply comes to be. This odd documentary, with no dialogue or narration, comes from Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter, and includes scenes shot in plant-processing facilities as well as those for meat. Some of the more fascinating sequences in fact are the harvesting of olives (an amusing combination of low and high tech methods are used) and the cropdusting of a sunflower field (a beautiful scene, though it evokes Silent Spring).
The film was shot in dozens of different locations across Europe. It is hard to imagine it being made in the United States, where the security clearance to enter a chicken farm rivals a military base. In interviews Geyrhalter explains that some facility owners were probably proud to show off their state of the art processes (the fish gutter/vacuumer is inarguably elegant) while others were hesitant to allow access. This movie portrays a fact that has driven many people (myself included, albeit temporarily) to vegetarianism: The pragmatic and efficient handling of food animals is indistinguishable from cruelty.
The handling of chickens seems especially rough: they are always treated as raw material, and never as birds. To treat them even to the standards of lab animals would mean an unacceptable increase of overhead. How are five thousand chickens brought from the feedlot to the processing line? With a riding vacuum cleaner, straight to the super fast conveyer belt, how else? It becomes clear why animal care standards in industrial food production are regulated by government mandate and not through voluntary compliance. At one point I turned to my wife and remarked "I want to pay ten dollars a dozen for eggs from now on."
Interspersed with the footage of the labor being done are scenes of the laborers on breaks, quietly eating their own food before returning to the hard work of providing it for the whole continent. These scenes maintain the pace of the movie, which most audiences will find glacial. It's meant to be taken in slowly, with deep breaths between images, and pauses for reflection. The scale is enormous, with the camera either sitting before a giant arena of food production, or slowly rolling through thousands of meters of stalls, pens, greenhouses, dissembly lines. Gone are the unkempt gory hellholes of Upton Sinclairs Jungle, instead technicians in white Tyvek coveralls hose stainless steel equipment down with an approved disinfectant and water solution.
The most maddening thing about Our Daily Bread is the dearth of actual information provided. Sometimes that makes for a better film: we are surprised to see what the process provides; we are not spoken down to (or spoken to at all) and we do not have our hand held. But the viewer craves a title card, a caption, any indication of setting. "Olive Grove, Spain," or "Lettuce Field, Southern Austria," would suffice. There is a long sequence of men descending, then moving about in, what? A salt mine is the only logical conclusion, but I amused myself by imagining they were harvesting granulated sugar from the sweet rich earth.
The moment that conscious beings dread in the abattoir, the single action that turns an animal into meat and meat by-products, is surprisingly discreet. In most cases we see living animals urged into a chute and then dead animals pulled out the other end. Other times we see the digestive system carefully separated from the rest of the carcass, often in ingenious ways. The workers go about their tasks with efficient nonchalance: attach a chain here, make a cut there, then they are ready for the next one, and the hundred after that. Only in the final moments of the film do we really experience an animal's death. A head of cattle appears in the window of the processing plant, presumably led from an unseen truck. A worker wields the stunning device made famous as a murder weapon in No Country for Old Men expertly and effortlessly. The cow slumps down and the cylindrical chute she was standing in slowly rotates on it's axis, pouring the animal onto the conveyer. Quickly and inevitably another cow appears at the window, but she senses something is wrong and writhes and struggles a moment before the worker finds the right spot on her head with the stunner. Then she goes down and the machine continues.
Links:
Official Website
American Distributor Icarus Films
Olive harvesting clip. (may open automatically)