Eating Albion

Last night Producer Catherine and I went to see ‘Our Daily Bread’ at the ICA. Geyrhalter has filled his 92 minutes with ‘somewhere-in-Euroland’ vignettes of food production, from the growing of crops and rearing of animals to their eventual picking, slaughter and processing.

Geyrhalter explains it thus:
“In this film a look behind the structures [of food production] is permitted, time’s provided to take in sounds and images, and it’s possible to think about the world where our basic foodstuffs are produced, which is normally ignored.”

It takes a while to get into the pace of the film, and though it’s bloody and raw in parts, it’s never gory or sensationalist. Yet neither is it a traditional documentary. It’s like a moving Andraias Gurskey or something, and like the processes it shows it’s very mediated and rhythmic in places.

What I liked about the film was that it doesn’t judge. It doesn’t judge the producers, the employees, or ultimately, us the consumers. It just shows you industrial agriculture from around Europe and lets you draw your own conclusions. I know what mine are, but the important thing is that Geyrhalter doesn’t presume to tell us his.

Setting aside ethics for a moment, the design and industrialisation is just incredible. The machine for the evisceration of the farmed salmon is amazing - slit and gutted in less than three seconds by a set of slicers and suckers that wouldn’t look out of place at the end of Edward Scissorhand’s sleeves. We also see a machine for picking up live broiler chickens and putting them into crates unharmed and alive, and who had the job of designing the apparatus for castrating piglets?! Industrialisation, after all, is nothing but the physical manifestation of the thought ‘This is boring - there must be a faster way of doing this!’

Geyrhalter says of the processes:

“Plants and animals are treated just like any other goods, and smooth functioning is extremely important. The most important thing is how the animals can be born, raised and held as efficiently and inexpensively as possible, how to treat them so they’re as fresh and undamaged as possible when they arrive at the slaughterhouse, and that the levels of medications and stress hormones in the meat are below the legal limits. No one thinks about whether they’re happy.”

In one of Geyrhalter’s trademark tracking shots, we see sows unable to stand up in their farrowing cages. They were so cramped that in some cases their swollen udders were forced between the bars of the cage. This system was banned in the UK in 1999. The EU banned tethers from the start of 2006, although stalls will remain legal until 2014. More on farrowing cages here.

Geyrhalter also addresses the workers, most of whom aren’t part of some sinister grey economy, but ordinary and in some cases highly skilled people. They don’t appear to have any issues with the tasks they perform, and to criticise them would be hypocritical. We see them having lunch, taking cigarette breaks, and chatting on the way down the salt mines. These moments come as breaks for the viewer just as much as they do for the worker on camera.

Geyrhalter doesn’t really tell us which country each segment is shot in, “It’s irrelevant for this film whether a company that produces baby chicks is located in Austria, Spain or Poland.” So seeing it from a British point of view, one could be tempted to think that these are ‘Continental’ practices, along with veal crates and foie gras. That would be a mistake on two counts. One, much of the food produced in the UK is grown or raised in the same way, and two, as we saw with the recent Bernard Matthews bird flu scare, a lot of the food we eat in this country comes from Europe.

If you’re interested in food mass production - and you should be because we all eat some of it, after all - try and see this film if you can. It on at the ICA until the weekend. At least watch the trailers and have a root round the website, which is very good. http://www.ourdailybread.at. Here’s the Channel4 review as well.  Also keep an eye out for this ‘Food Design’ by Martin Hablesreiter (and made by the same film Company), which is based on the book of the same name.

Footnote: The ICA was, as ever, full of white kids with wonky haircuts just like it was the first time I went there as an art student in ‘94. With my own wonky hair cut long gone, I still loved it.