‘Food, Inc. 2’ Review: A Disappointing Sequel Lacks the First Film’s Tasty and Revelatory Insights

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic There’s an unintentionally surreal moment in “Food Inc. 2.” Eric Schlosser, the journalist who wrote “Fast Food Nation,” is talking about how the rise of our corporatized, centralized, industrialized food system stifles the very kind of competition that could pose a challenge to it.

He reaches back, with a level-headed liberal boomer nostalgia comparable to that of Michael Moore, to talk about the growth of the middle class in the ’50s and ’60s, and how that was a period of rising wages for American workers, all of which has faded away (a view not so different from that of many MAGA believers, but let’s leave that for that another day).

Here’s the surreal part. To illustrate this postwar reverie, the movie accompanies it with a 60-year-old documentary film clip presenting the wonder of supermarkets, with the camera lingering on stacks of Campbell’s Soup cans and products like Minute Rice, Ritz Crackers, and Van Camp’s Original Baked Beans. (The film makes a point to include the cash register ringing up a total of $2.99, as if there were something miraculous about that Kennedy-era price.) Watching the clip, though, all I could think was: Did the filmmakers get amnesia about the fact that those supermarkets — those products — represent everything that they’re against?

That, of course, was the head-spinning message of “Food, Inc.” back in 2009: that the food we buy in supermarkets is, to a significant extent, a grand illusion — processed glop and sugar and chemicals and glorified cardboard presented as “nutrition.” (I grew up on Campbell’s Soup, and loved it, but I’m sorry, what those cans contained was very tasty food filler.) I’m tweaking the filmmakers, Robert Kenner (who directed the.