David Brancaccio of PBS’s Now show interviewed filmmaker Robert Kenner, the director of “Food, Inc.” a few days ago. The movie takes a very critical look at the modern food industry and helps viewers better understand why supermarket fare for the most part is crap, and why 67% of Americans are obese or overweight. The full interview is 24 minutes long. Here are some good tidbits:

1. 90% of supermarket food has corn or soy products in it. (That’s because soy and corn are subsidized by the government, making them cheap to produce).

2. Fast food chains were the original drivers of the industrialization of food. McDonald’s is and has been for years the largest buyer of ground beef, pork, chicken, potatoes, and tomatoes in the US. And it will only work with suppliers than can provide a steady, uniform, reliable product 24/7/365. Real food doesn’t work like that

3. Candy and Soda are cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetables. What do you think poor people will choose to eat?

4. Food industry claims that consumers should show personal responsibility when choosing what to eat are insidious.

5. Food has not gotten safer over the years. Not if a single burger can have meat from one thousand cows in it.

6. Really sad – the federal government does not have the right to recall contaminated meat off of supermarket shelves.

7. A ray of light – consumers, through personal preference, convinced Wal-Mart to switch to milk from cows who did not receive growth hormones.

8. Watch out for “food libel laws” – Industry will sue you if you don’t talk nice about food products. Example: Oprah Winfrey was engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the meat industry for saying she’d consider abstaining from burgers at the height of the mad cow scare a decade ago.

9. The legal fees for the movie were 3 times higher than all his previous films combined.

What to do at the supermarket:

Your choices are what ultimately fuel the food industry. By buying unprocessed foods, mostly from the supermarket perimeter, you will avoid many of the pitfalls of modern industrialized food-like substances.

Get Fooducated: RSS Subscription or Email Subscription

Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/fooducate

Help us test our new food comparison tool: alpha.fooducate.com