Super Size Me

posted to www.marxmail.org on June 8, 2004

Although "Super Size Me" has been widely recognized as borrowing liberally from the style of Michael Moore, in many ways it will also remind one of the classic mad scientist movie. As producer and director Morgan Spurlock embarks on a 30 day experiment in which nothing but McDonald's meals are eaten 3 times a day, you might think of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" or comic variations on this theme, like "The Nutty Professor." Instead of being turned into a monster, the lean and healthy star and narrator of this astute documentary is turned into a depressed, overweight man addicted to foods that might kill him--according to the team of doctors who are seen throughout the film monitoring his steady decay.

Spurlock decided to conduct this experiment after becoming aware of the obesity epidemic in the USA. He draws attention to three overlapping phenomena that account for this: the widespread availability of fast food outlets, their tendency to push oversized portions and the sedentary habits of an American population ever more reliant on the automobile.

Since McDonald's has the lion's share of the fast food business, Spurlock decides to only dine there. He has some simple ground rules. He will not eat anything except what is on their menu for a 30 day period. He will try to avoid exercise as much as possible--a walk to and fro the Golden Arches to pick up his meal becomes his daily workout. If offered a super sized meal, he will never say no.

On the third day the accumulated impact of a high caloric intake catches up to him. Sitting at the wheel of his car trying to finish an oversized sandwich becomes too much for him and he throws up through his window. The camera lingers over the remains on the street. This scene and a scene later in the film of stomach-reduction surgery are not for the squeamish.

Although Spurlock has a completely different film presence than Moore, he is very much an effective character in film terms. He supplies almost no autobiographical material and tries to come across as just a regular guy. With his Fu Manchu moustache and rugged good looks, the 30 something Spurlock will remind you of a contestant on TV's "Fear Factor". In his case, the contest is all the more daunting. If you have the choice of eating worms for two minutes or McDonalds 3 times a day for a month, you will most likely opt for the former after seeing this film.

Despite his almost frat-boy sensibility (you can see him being interviewed on David Letterman's show), you can sense a kind of outrage simmering beneath the surface especially when it comes to the damage fast food does to children. He visits a school cafeteria that serves french fries, soft drinks and other junk food without the slightest compunction. We eventually discover that the vendor is none other than Sodexho, whose parent company is one of the largest players in the privatization of American prisons.

Although McDonald's food threatens to kill him, he plods on until the 30th day. One of the things that keeps him going is that he soon becomes addicted to the stuff. Heavy doses of sugar and caffeine can hook you just as easily as nicotine or crack cocaine. On the final day, he is weighed by his doctors who inform him that he has gained 25 pounds and exhibits unhealthy symptoms across the board. His liver has begun to look like the one belonging to a serious alcoholic.

"Super Size Me" is showing in movie theaters all across the USA right now. For schedule information, contact the film's website at: http://www.supersizeme.com/

I saw this film just a week after reading Richard Manning's "Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization". Although I was planning to say something about this book at some point, Spurlock's film seems just the proper occasion to do so. Manning's thesis is a controversial one. He argues that once we stopped becoming a hunting-and-gathering society and evolved into one based on agriculture, we effectively undermined not only our health but our chances for long time survival on the planet. Manning himself lives in rural Montana and tries to subsist on game that he shoots as much as possible.

Manning is not concerned with agriculture per se. He is favorably inclined toward farmer's markets based on local and seasonal products. It is much more agribusiness that is the target of his critique and especially the production of the key grains that serve as a foundation for class society and civilization, namely rice, corn, potatoes and wheat. These four commodities have proved essential to the explosive growth of urban populations, culture, and class exploitation--all of the features of civilization. They have also resulted in the severe decline of health standards by the peasants who produce them as well as the soil that is used in their cultivation.

One of his most profound insights is the connection between agriculture and catastrophes such as fire or flood. Without such events, modern agriculture would have never emerged. Without floodplains, rice cannot be grown. He cites anthropologist Charles Higham: "The accumulated archaeological evidence is unanimous in supporting low-lying aquatic habitat as the most likely location for the transition to rice cultivation." The same thing is true for corn production in ancient Mexico where the Maya employed slash-and-burn techniques that are described euphemistically in scholarly literature as "swidden agriculture". Manning notes that "the point of the fire is to reset the biological clock".

Once the soil has been exhausted, there is an inexorable drive to colonize new territories and start all over. Alfred Crosby calls this "ecological imperialism". Throughout the world, the European model of agriculture has been transplanted. In the USA, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina and Australia you see the same essentially productive but in the long run wasteful techniques employed. Once the soil and water has been exhausted in these regions which amount to the food baskets of the world, there is no more land to be conquered.

If modern farming has learned to use industrial technology to make wheat, corn, potatoes and rice abundant, it has still not learned how to really keep the entire planet free from hunger. By generating plenitude for some, others have to go hungry. In addition, those who do enjoy a heavy serving of calories each day end up looking like Morgan Spurlock.

In recent years, the capitalist system has grown inextricably linked with the commodification of food and their production by a handful of big businesses that care about nothing but profits. One of them, Archer-Midland-Daniels (ADM), gets closely scrutinized in Manning's book. That's where the connection to Morgan Spurlock's film can be made.

It turns out that with the complicity of successive administrations in Washington, this giant corporation has made corn syrup production a huge focus of its business. This is a sweetener that is found in all fast foods, especially soft drinks, ketchup and other junk that is dispensed with your super size meal.

In the USA, about 42 percent of all processed corn goes into sweeteners, something that you never buy directly but that finds its way into just about every processed food. Manning observes that "it is in scalloped potatoes, barbecue sauce, salad dressing, ketchup, oatmeal cookies, Wheat Thins, Campbell's Chunky Soup, granola bars, canned fruit, SpaghettiOs, ice cream and virtually every carbonated soft drink". This omnipresent "food" product is largely responsible for the obesity epidemic in the USA. Citing Barron's, Manning tells us about the bottom-line considerations that drove this process:

"In the late Seventies and early Eighties, ADM gambled that fructose corn syrup would eventually supplant sugar as the sweetener of choice for the soft-drink bottling industry. To overcome bottler resistance however, ADM had to constantly add new capacity in already glutted syrup markets… The displacement of sucrose took place in agonizing stages. But ADM emerged as the big winner, leaving rivals such as CPC International and American Maize in the dust."

At the risk of sounding like a hairshirt enemy of popular culture, I am repulsed by McDonald's and everything it stands for. Somehow the image of Bill Clinton wolfing down this garbage in 'faux' good-old-boy style makes me all the more attracted to the monkish Ralph Nader who spent much of his time at his last Madison Square Garden appearance railing against fast food and other "gains" of industrial society. I'll end with a quote from his 2000 speech accepting the nomination of the Green Party:

"The food processing giants and the fast food chains are busy displacing indigenous foods with fat and sugar pumps a la McDonalds fast food. At the same time, the biotechnology companies drive to change the nature of nature without answering basic scientific or need questions. The banking giants and their IMF and World Bank cohorts are continuing their structural adjustment polices in Third World countries that cut public budgets, end critical consumer subsidies and replace real food acreage with cash crops for exports, while imposing environmentally damaging megaprojects that enrich the local oligarchy. The timber companies, working directly or through local firms are rapidly destroying the rich biological diversity of the equatorial forests. The large energy companies want these countries to buy more nuclear and coal-burning plants, develop the same fossil fuel-nuclear alliances that undermine local renewable solar technologies and energy efficiencies. By cutting such deals and supporting dictatorial regimes and the domestic oligarchies, democratic developments that would help the people, for example, land reform, agrarian credit, cooperatives, trade union rights, and political reforms are stymied and destroyed."

This is a message that needs to be heard again this year.