Our Daily Bread

Secondary schools throughout England were sent a DVD of Al Gore’s documentary about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. I found it to be an amazing film, which won an Oscar, and for his work on global warming Al Gore has been awarded a Nobel prize - a bit prematurely perhaps, but his work on giving the controversial subject a high profile cannot be faulted.

Recently a High Court judge was asked to give a ruling about the educational use of the documentary and found that there were nine major factual errors, so the Government should accompany the issue of the dvd with new guidance notes, giving alternative views to those represented by Gore as fact. Although Mr Justice Burton did add that the documentary was broadly accurate.

Last week, thanks to the Soil Association I saw an even more important documentary, Our Daily Bread, directed by Nikclaus Geyrhalter, an Austrian who, between 2003-05 travelled through Europe filming the industrial food chain that ends in our stomach. Geyrhalter wanted to show zones and areas that people don’t normally see, and so the file Features pigs, chickens, apples, sunflowers, cows, and workers in sterile factories.

The unique element about this film is that there is no commentary, only the sound that comes from what we are seeing, and often what we are seeing is not for the faint hearted. In fact I almost came out of the private cinema at the Institute Francais halfway through the evening. The documentary lasts for ninety minutes and at times it is extremely harrowing. In fact it took me back to my childhood when I used to go to the news theatres of the time which just ran newsreels. My particular favourite was at Victoria station, and it was there that I was taken to see the news documentary of the release of Belsen, the concentration camp. It was appalling and had a lasting effect upon me. How one set of human beings, in this case Germans, could have done what they did to another group of human beings, in this case Jews, was indescribable.

And so it was after watching Our Daily Bread. It exposes how our food is mass produced and how the way that chickens and pigs are treated is totally wrong. Quite why the Animal Liberation front has not homed in on this mass trafficking of animals to feed mankind I do not know. We all know about battery hens, and we see the true horrors of this form of providing us with eggs. As for the chicken we eat, first we see a machine that sweeps up groups of hens kept in a huge hangar-sized shed while they are clucking and searching for food. The next thing they are going up a chute to be stunned and then plucked and prepared for the supermarket shelves. Much the same happens to pigs, but even worse is the end of our beef cattle who are herded one by one into a metal container and killed by a man with humane killer. In front of them the beast that has just been killed is being lifted by a machine, so it is no wonder that some of the cattle about to be killed panic and try to avoid the inevitable consequences.

No detail is then spared, as they are cut in half, and disembowelled by men in white plastic clothing, which gets covered in blood and are then hosed off after each beast has been dealt with. I don’t know why but it is more hurting to see women in many of the dehumanizing jobs in these mass food providing factories, either flicking live chicks this way and that, as they spot the duff ones, or even worse. Perhaps it is sexist to think this, but it could be that my admiration for women feels let down. I fully expect men to do anything for money, but women?

It is not all horror. There are moments when the director films the factory workers enjoying their snack lunches or whatever. Totally immune to what they have just been doing, or are about to do to earn their living. A lot of this work must have a bad effect upon their personalities. I certainly would never pick a row with someone who works in an abattoir.

Afterwards I noted most women rushing to the lavatory. I went too, but it could have been for different reasons. Our children should be shown this film. It would have far more effect, I feel, on what they eat in future than Jamie Oliver’s advice. It is an argument for the return of humane, indeed, organic farming where the crops as well as the animals are respected.

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