The documentary’s title declares its stance: local, sustainable, and organic = good; factory farm and agribusiness = bad. More specifically, the US Department of Agriculture and state departments of agriculture = bad, too. Their restrictions on and/or outright prohibition of selling raw milk are tops among Canty’s complaints. She comes by her views through personal experience. Her 4-year-old son suffered from asthma and various allergies, all of which stopped bothering him once he started drinking raw milk.
“Farmageddon,’’ Canty says on the film’s website, “is in no way meant to convince anyone to drink raw milk, or eat grass fed beef, but rather [is] an argument to allow those that want to make those choices to do so. It is simply about freedom of food choice. The government needs to stop harassing small farmers, private food buying clubs and co-ops. Without food freedom … we are not free.’’
“Food freedom’’ is a striking, because somewhat odd, phrase. It has sort of a Tea Party sound to it; in fact, US Representative Ron Paul makes a very brief appearance among the documentary’s talking heads, nearly all of whom are farmers and advocates. “Food freedom,’’ one could argue, begins not with freedom to choose but ability to afford - there are subsistence consumers no less than there are subsistence farmers - but Canty’s focus is on liberty rather than economics.
Some of the stories she relates are almost as startling as seeing that cop with a Glock aimed at watermelons. The Faillaces are a Warren, Vt., couple who wanted to start a sheep dairy with imported animals from Europe and New Zealand. The USDA went after them, eventually confiscating their sheep and destroying them, ostensibly because of fears of mad cow disease. Canty relates similar stories of government hounding - of a dairy farmer in upstate New York, a Mennonite farmer in Pennsylvania, food co-ops in Ohio, Georgia, and California.
