Entertainment

BEAN THERE, BUN THAT

THE latest of many documentaries from the Your Hamburger Will Kill You subgenre is “Food, Inc.” Trading on now-familiar gross-out tactics (images of corporate slaughterhouses and chicken sheds), the movie offers very little that food radicals don’t already know. Journalists Eric Schlosser (who is shown enjoying a burger, somewhat undercutting the film’s point) and Michael Pollan serve as the packhorses, turning up to say things on camera they’ve been saying in print for years.

Unsubstantiated charges — such as that our food is getting more dangerous — are melded with scenes meant to raise alarm about the mass-production techniques that are essential to feeding the country cheaply. (If you’re older than college age, you’re old enough to remember when something called “hunger” was America’s great social problem. Now it’s overeating.)

The occasional interesting points — about, for instance, the heavy subsidies for corn and soybeans that make junk food the logical choice for the poor — aren’t pursued very far. Isn’t this a scandal of DC, not the food industry?

And a long section about how Monsanto is evil because it patented a soybean gene and protects it in court seems shrill and pointless. In the end, “Food, Inc.” concludes that we should all buy the organic, locally grown and expensive bourgeois-bohemian food that the small audience for this film is already buying.

Running time: 99 minutes. Rated: PG (disturbing images). At the Film Forum, Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue.