Our Daily Bread

Tues 29 April 2008 10pm
This beautiful and evocative documentary is a powerful look at the industry of agriculture throughout Europe.

There might not be anything new about the idea that "you are what you eat", but the old maxim seems particularly urgent at the moment. Since the turn of the millennium the issues of food production and sustainability have become ever more serious. We're all increasingly aware of the potential dangers of fast food, the polluting effects of intensive agriculture and pressures on global food supply and our appetite for information about exactly what we are putting on our plates and the impact of our feeding habits has grown accordingly.

Strong views on the subject?
Post them on the forum >

Documentaries like Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation have done a lot to answer that craving, but Our Daily Bread proves there's still room for more - and more than one way to approach the issue. In contrast to Morgan Spurlock and Richard Linklater's fast-talking, hard hitting agit-prop this is a languorous, wordless look at the food industry that offers no judgements or opinions, but is every bit as effective in provoking outrage.

A strange, complex automated world
Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter has elected to let his camera do the talking. Shooting on high definition video in various farms, slaughterhouses and food processing plants around Europe and using long, slow and panoramic tracking and crane shots that wouldn't feel out of place on 2001: A Space Odyssey he simply shows the viewer various stages in food production, from artificial insemination of cattle stock to abattoirs, via gigantic tomato greenhouses and acres and acres of lurid green asparagus. Most of the images wouldn't look out of place in a science-fiction film either.

Geyrhalter reveals a strange, complex automated world, generally illuminated by discomforting artificial lights and full of strange technology. Computers flicker as a bull is brought in to have its seed captured in a stainless steel room; thousands and thousands of chicks roll past on conveyor belts; salmon are sucked out of the water with a huge vacuum and then chopped up and eviscerated within seconds by a machine whose complexity would baffle our ancestors.