Food, Inc.

Kenner takes us up and down the food industrial complex. He has hidden-camera footage of a hog-farm kill floor and pastoral images of Joel Salatin and his employees working on his modest, seemingly all-natural farm in the Shenandoah Valley. He tags along as Barbara Kowalcyk, a food-safety advocate and mother who lost a young son to toxic beef, makes the rounds on Capitol Hill. The film photographs Eduardo Peña, a union organizer in North Carolina, as he watches cops bang down the doors of Mexicans who work in Smithfield Foods’ slaughterhouse. We meet Carole Morison, a poultry producer for Perdue until she refused to make expensive Perdue-mandated upgrades to her chicken house that, she says, would have kept the birds in total darkness (by her own admission, they had it pretty awful in the first place). This is food and its vast discontents.

The movie covers all the bases, from possible government corruption to the bad consequences of good economic sense. With regard to the latter, Kenner finds a family of four whose mother says she buys fast food because its cheaper than fresh food. There’s not much room to argue with her. Almost everywhere, a pound of broccoli costs more than anything on the McDonald’s value menu. Her husband is a diabetic whose diet, like a lot of Americans’, includes foods loaded with high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener that helps use up the country’s abundant government-subsidized corn crops. But the mother is in a bind since they have to pay for his medical needs, in addition to their other expenses, while praying his poor health doesn’t cost him his job as a trucker.

One imagines a movie devoted almost entirely to the hard issue of eating and class, how processed foods are cheaper than fresh food. Of course, some nights the drive-thru is the easiest thing on earth. None of the heroes in “Food, Inc.’’ - and I’m sure Kenner finds all his human subjects heroic - is likely to buy that excuse. This isn’t a movie terribly big on listening to why you just ate that Baconator.