Blackhawk Sierra Club screens Food, Inc., March 22 at JustGoods

From press release

How much do we really know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? One of the Academy Award-nominated feature documentary films tries to answer that question.

Blackhawk Sierra Club hosts the film Food, Inc., at 7 p.m., Monday, March 22, at JustGoods meeting room, 201 Seventh St., Rockford. The program is free and open to the public.

In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly-mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.

A handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment now control our nation’s food supply. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won’t go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually.

Americans are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults. Featuring interviews with experts Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc., reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we become as a nation and where we are going from here.

For more information, contact Rich Muniz at (815) 222-8572.