When a system that is essential to our lives, one upon which most of us are dependent, becomes unhealthy, secretive and unbalanced, not to mention centralized, consolidated and subsidized beyond all reasonable measure, it easily becomes the target of investigative reporting and film documentaries. And as some might conclude, we’re not referring to our financial, energy or health care systems here, but rather to our food system, the one most frequently taken for granted.

Now out in theaters across the country, Food Inc., the film, is one of a growing collection of exposés and documentaries to inform an unsuspecting public, the great mass of food consumers everywhere, where their food really comes from and what’s behind all those well-stocked grocery shelves.

Produced and directed by Robert Kenner, Food Inc. received encouragement and support from Eric Schlosser, who wrote Fast Food Nation. The film began as a rather routine investigation of industrial food, but during the process Kenner was foiled by corporation after corporation as he tried to get a candid look at what goes on behind the doors of slaughterhouses, processing plants and factory farms. As a result, Kenner realized that what he was really investigating was the concentration of corporate power, profit and the suppression of the truth in our industrial food system. Is this beginning to sound all too familiar?  While the film focuses much of its attention on the meat industry, with scenes of fast-moving assembly lines of animal protein, it juxtaposes that world to the world of Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, where the chicken necks are wrung by hand in the open sunshine in same the fields where, minutes before, the chickens were scratching the ground for a live bug or worm.

Joel Salatin is to farming what Alice Waters is to food. His is a pasture-based, bucolic, holistic, poly-culture operation in Virginia selling his animals and crop cornucopia directly to happy customers locally and around the region. He is outspoken and articulate and, as you can imagine, he is no friend of “Big Ag/Food,” for reasons he clearly articulates in the film.

Food Inc. is well crafted and told, a quality film that conveys its message quite graphically, but it leaves the viewer with few options. On the one hand, viewers are encouraged to go to Walmart to buy their Stonyfield yogurt; on the other, they can drive to Joel Salatin’s farm to buy their chicken and eggs. And that’s where the film ends.  As is fairly typical of food critiques, the film stirs one to action with little edification. The movie fails to help its audiences learn how to become “food citizens” within their own communities to bring about the changes they want, let alone point them to the many other choices available to them in communities around the country.

Numerous family farmers are now networking together in an attempt to create a “third tier” in the food system that provides food-conscious citizens with more tasty, nutritious food, produced in environmentally friendly ways with full transparency so customers can engage them, thereby building trusting relationships with those who produce their food.

For the past several years, this whole new “agriculture of the middle” alternative has been developing—middle in terms of farm size and middle as somewhere on the continuum between direct marketing (farmers’ markets and CSAs) and the undifferentiated commodity markets (ADM, Cargill, Kraft and McDonald’s). And Food Inc, unfortunately, makes no mention at all of this new tier in our food system.  Just as the middle class has been shrinking in the past few years, the same has been true in agriculture but happening over a longer period of time. In the 1930s there were approximately 7 million farms in the country, most of them the mid-sized family farm. Today, there are 2.2 million farms but 32 percent of them do not even produce $1,000 in annual gross sales, they only “could have” produced such sales.  Growth in the number of farms today is only among farms with less than $2,500 in annual gross sales and farms with more than $500,000 in gross sales—many of them factory farms like the ones portrayed in Food Inc. and from which the bulk of our food comes from. What happened to the farms of the middle, the idyllic family farms of our memories? They have been disappearing at increasing rates—either going out of business or becoming larger, typically by buying out their neighbors.

What’s truly ironic is that there is a growing demand for high-quality, differentiated food—food with special attributes; food with superior qualities, especially freshness, taste and good nutrition; food that comes with an authentic story; food that provides consumers with a trusting relationship. Given the problems portrayed by Food Inc., consumers will increasingly want to know the hand that feeds them. And it is precisely the farmers of the middle that we are losing, those who are in the best position to provide all of those attributes in quantities that can supply the markets where most people shop or restaurants where they dine out.  This is the hopeful choice missing from Food Inc. Every one of us truly can make a difference three times a day, as the movie suggests near the end—but our choices far exceed the two choices suggested: going to Joel Salatin’s farm or aWalmart super center! And the choices available to us, but not mentioned in the movie, can begin the process of ending the mass disappearance of these mid-sized family farms. It can provide them with new and innovative marketing options and help create an infrastructure that can move their quality products to market.  In 2004, the Agriculture of the Middle (AOTM) National Initiative was launched to study the disappearance of mid-scale farms and make recommendations to reverse the trend. AOTM has three thrusts: research, policy development and business development. The Association of Family Farms (AFF) has become the business development component of AOTM. AFF seeks to organize mid-sized family farms, aggregate product and, through the creation of value chains, move and distribute products into regular market channels.

Seeking to change the food system paradigm in which farmers have traditionally been price takers (meaning they have no say in the price they receive for their products), where consumers (food citizens) also have little or no voice and/or relationship to where their food comes fromor how it was produced, and in which food quality and values are subjugated to quantity and cheapness, there are many successful examples of agriculture of the middle/third tier models emerging around the country.

Turning the camera lens on some of the more prominent examples:

• Organic Valley Family of Farms is the largest organic farmerowned co-op in the world, engaging over 1,400 farming families successfully marketing mainly dairy products. Their innovative ownership structure provides farmers with a substantially higher than conventional milk price and consumers with lots of information and authentic stories about the farmers themselves.
• Country Natural Beef (formerly Oregon Country Beef ) requires their mid-scale rancher members to regularly visit supermarkets to talk with customers about their products and provide samples.  CNB is certified by the Food Alliance, the country’s leading certifier of sustainable farm products.
• Good Natured Family Farm Alliance in the Kansas City area is comprised of approximately 100 small to medium-sized farms in the region. They have formed a special marketing partnership (value chain) with Ball Foods Stores in Kansas City to feature their local, high-quality range of farm products.
• Shepherd’s Grain in Washington State is another farmer co-op successfully producing high-quality, sustainably produced grain products that are marketed throughout the Pacific Northwest. They have demonstrated that even flour can be de-commodified and have special attributes valued by consumers. (Shepherd’s Grain has succeeded in developing one of the best business models we have described as “Values-Based Value Chains” (VBVC) in our AFF literature.  In a VBVC everyone in the chain—farmers, processors, distributors, etc.—cooperate rather than compete with one another to provide the best product to the consumer. The farmers, millers and bakers all sit down together to determine what each needs for the entire enterprise to be successful.)
• Red Tomato in Boston aggregates product from local and regional farms and distributes to outlets throughout Boston. Their mission is connecting farmers and consumers through marketing, trade and education. Their motto is “Trust the farmer, know the farm, love the tomato.”
• New Seasons Market is a chain of nine neighborhood grocery stores in Portland, Oregon. They are an ideal example of a local retail food store that sources much of their product locally/regionally and sells organic and sustainably produced food at very reasonable prices.

If there were to be a Food Inc. sequel—and we think there ought to be—it should focus its attention on these emerging stories of a growing “middle” way—a way that promises to better balance and diversify our overall food system providing greater access to good, healthy food and a renewed relationship with the farmer and the land. 

Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a longtime leader in national and international sustainable agriculture, shares an appointment as Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and as president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York.

Larry Yee is an Emeritus with the University of California. He is co-founder of the Association of Family Farms and is a member of the national coordinating committee for Agriculture of the Middle as well as the past co-chair of the California Roots of Change Council.