Our Daily Bread [DVD]

I found this a highly unusual and visually fascinating documentary about primary food production, both animal and vegetable. The lack of any sort of commentary initially annoyed me because so much of what is shown raises the question: what's going on here but after a while I found I was settling down to the rhythm of the editing. The way director Geyrhalter places the camera and then just lets it roll will grow on you. Even where there is some fast machinery the shot is invariably a static one of the equipment.

The documentary looks at fruit and vegetable production and collection, animal husbandry of chickens, cows, pigs and nicely I thought, fish farming plus a visit to a salt mine. The most eye opening thing to me was the amount of mechanization involved in food production at the farm level though it seemed that the equipment had been designed to work most efficiently when the fruit, animals or fish were standard sizes. Despite the huge investment in equipment on these European farms (or plants) it was still cost effective to employ shift-workers.

There are some quirky scenes: several of workers having a break, eating or having a cigarette (these were just long static shots looking at the person); spraying everything in a slaughter house with some sort of foam (a detergent maybe) digging small holes in mounts on a field and either planting or collecting something. I would have thought an occasional black strip across the bottom of the screen with a white caption would not have hurt the integrity of the movie and helped the viewer.

Despite what others might say I found nothing shocking in the movie. This usually refers to animal slaughter but it is done in a simple straightforward way with machinery doing most of the work and rather intriguingly everything shown involving animals is done at a reasonable speed in the factories shown.

The movie concentrates on primary food production and not the industrial creation of processed food...maybe that's Geyrhalter's next assignment. Overall a very impressive and visually remarkable look at the subject and one of those documentaries that is certainly worth seeing more than once.

This well-wrought documentary, set in Europe, makes visible the shocking hugeness of contemporary factory farms. Despite the title, the film is not explicitly about "our daily bread". It is about the primary production of enormous quantities of food in factories, machine-dominated factories that produce everything including olives, salt, eggs, unborn calves for veal, fish-flesh, and hydroponic vegetables.

I found the absence of musical soundtrack and authorial comment a relief, and the sounds emanating from the factory buildings, fields, glasshouses, machines, animal and bird subjects, immensely telling.On occasions the silence of the animals was chilling. This is the farming of Technopoly where machines farm vast monocultures, and hitherto unimaginable cruelties are practised on sentient beings, including the humans who operate the factories with their press-buttons, de-beakers, levers, insemination probes and buckets, gigantic harvesters, sharp knives, electric prods and pressure cleaners. At the end of each episode is a human touch in the showing of the workers from the featured production areas taking a meal-break or "smoko", time off (or out) from the rapid tempo of soul-less machinery that governs their lives.

The horror of factory farming casts a grim shadow on our lives, and on our presumption that the world can endlessly supply more and more of our growing food demands at little cost. This film shows us how our prayer, "Give us this day our daily bread" is answered by Technopoly, and opens our eyes to the trespasses we might commit with each act of food consumption.

Those who like their food "more", "lots", "fast","efficient", would have no quibbles about the farming practices shown in the film. Those of us who sense that factory farming erodes the soul of the world might view the film as the beginning of a conversation about changing our food production and consumption practices to those that emphasise gentle reciprocity with Earth and with other sentient beings. Such a conversation would be deepened and enriched by a reading of Vandana Shiva's brilliant "Soil Not Oil. Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis" (2008).

This award winning documentary is strangely mesmerising and totally fascinating. But there is some scenes which are not for the squeamish. But if you want to see how our mass produced food is created then this is for you.