Shooting on high-definition video in various farms, slaughterhouses and food processing plants around Europe, the viewer is shown the 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.
Director Nikolaus Geyrhalter reveals a strange and complex automated world, generally illuminated by discomforting artificial lights and full of strange technology. Computers flicker as a bull is brought 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 eviscerated within seconds by a machine whose complexity would baffle our ancestors.
The view Our Daily Bread presents seems a very long way from the romantic small-holding ideal and the notion that we can have any real affinity with modern farming techniques.
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