Our daily bread

Unser täglich Brot by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Geyrhalter is one of the toughest and most difficult documentaries I've seen. It's a relentless and merciless presentation of the industrialization of food production. This film forces you to think for yourelf by throwing you into the quiet, noisy, uncanny room of your own thoughts and feelings. Does this sound like manipulation to you? I thought the film was the opposite of being manipulative because it really left the thinking, the hard work, the digestion, to the viewer.

The span of the documentary is large: through a quiet, witnessing camera, we are presented with pictures of industrial aspects of agriculture as well as gruesome images from the meat industry. At least upon first viewing (for various reasons, I think I will have to watch this several times) my reaction was that the shift between pictures of agriculture and the meat industry was very enlightning, as such a shift made me think about what "industrialization" means in different contexts and that my reactions to something being "industrial" were also very different in kind. Watching agriculture machines at work made me reflect on efficiency and the different political and historical aspects of that (in what way the development of agriculture has had an effect upon political matters on a global scale). Some things about the industrialization of agriculture are obviously harmful in a multitude of ways. The use of pesticides, for example. The harmfulness of large-scale European agriculture in relation to the economy and life of third world countries cannot be denied. Regrettably I know very little about these things and I feel terribly naive when it comes to these issues.

But, as a contrast, it was not harmfulness I was thinking of when I watched the scenes from the meat industry. Industrialization, here, means something else. Of course, in some sense we might have a different grasp of "tomatoes" and "corn" in comparison to how people would talk about "tomatoes" 100 years ago. But animals having become a commodity is a different sort of change, it seems to me. I know it is problematic to refer to how people perceived and related to animals "in other times". An innocent past is easily imagined, and I don't want to go there. But still I don't know how to make this point about animals-as-commodities, even if we leave the historical views aside, - I am confused. Perhaps it would be best to start looking at what we are willing to do to other beings. The being of "beings" is put in brackets due to the indstrial stance towards animals. And I don't intend "being" in an abstract sense here.

What does this "in brackets" mean? I think it the documentary was doing a good job in focusing on the worker's point of view. What does it mean, for the animal factory worker, to cut off parts of pig carcasses on an assembly line? To go through those movements as a part of a routine? Somehow, it is all too easy to consider "routine" as entailing a loss of meaning. Even if that is often true (by doing something a hundred times, it may turn into something that I simply do, unthinking) it is absolutely nothing that says that my eyes will not be opened to the character of what I do while I am performing the same routine for the 100:th time. Furthermore, "routines" are not always unreflected - or at least many things depend on what we mean when something is said to be "unreflected".

Is it intelligible that the meat industry worker goes through her routines in the same spirit that she would cut of plastic parts from a toy? These questions were buzzing in my head throughout the documentary. Even if the filmmaker didn't conduct any interviews, nor were there any scenes in which the workers talked about their job, the film still directed my attention at what it is like to live with a specific kind of job and a specific kind of work task. Many scenes focused on the agriculture / meat industry workers during breaks. Sipping coffee, eating a sandwitch, staring out in the blue, talking to one another (the talk was, however, transmitted to the viewer as a quiet buzz). To my delight, no polemic point was made about the worker's munching on a sandwitch while, in the next scene, killing a cow.

Is "taking a break" different for the agriculture worker, than it is for the meat industry worker? I mean: it seems quite different to take a break from picking tomatoes in relation to what it means to take a break from cleaning a factory floor from blood and guts. What do people talk about with their comrades? Are they making jokes about the dead animals? Are they talking about work at all, or is it a subject matter that is avoided as much as possible?

Are these empirical/psychological questions? Perhaps they could be, but when I watched the film, I got the feeling there are other dimensions as well. What one becomes of performing a particular form of work. The various things it means to be "bored", to "endure", to say things like "I hate my job".

The virtue of Geyrhalter's documentary is that it in no way glosses over the hard questions. There are no voiceover, no narrative (but there are certainly a sensibility as to the combination of scenes) and there are no soothing music. We do hear the roaring machines and the screaming animals.

Of course it is no news by now that consumers are usually alienated from the food that they buy and eat. But that it is no "news" hardly makes it less interesting, less worthy of reflection. At least for me, these are questions that are difficult on a day-to-day basis. The focus on the workers in this film also feels fresh. (In the same way as Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man was a fresh take on sentimentalization of, and alienation from, animals.)