Our Daily Bread

Cool, spare and without either the voice overs or talking-head interviews that characterize most documentaries, German filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter's film about mass food production allows images to speak for themselves. And what they say is more horrifying than anything in FAST FOOD NATION (2006). Filmed in various European countries, Geyrhalter's dispassionate eye affords equal weight to slaughterhouses, hens lined up in cruelly small cages and vast, hangar-like greenhouses; the effect is to make mechanized harvesting almost as disturbing as the butchering of animals. Cattle, fish, fowl and vegetables: They're all grist for the industrial food chain, pure product ...