I&rsquo;m happy to have any appetite at all since watching &ldquo;Food, Inc.&rdquo;</p><p>Director Robert Kenner&rsquo;s documentary is powerful. Maybe even life-changing.</p><p>The film posits that most of us know nothing about where our food comes from and that the big food corporations &mdash; a mere half dozen are responsible for most of the food on grocery shelves &mdash; would love to keep it that way.</p><p>There&rsquo;s little information in this expose that foodies haven&rsquo;t already encountered in books and magazines. But people who won&rsquo;t read such stuff often will watch movies, and &ldquo;Food, Inc.&rdquo; is smart, occasionally amusing and very, very motivating.</p><p>The film draws heavily on the work of authors Michael Pollan (&ldquo;The Omnivore&rsquo;s Dilemma&rdquo;) and Eric Schlosser (&ldquo;Fast Food Nation&rdquo;), both of whom appear on screen. &ldquo;Food, Inc.&rdquo; looks at the fallout of 50 years of food production shifting from family farms (cows grazing in grassy meadows, chickens pecking away in the barnyard &mdash; you can still find those images decorating packaged food) to a corporate model based on bigger, faster, more profitable.</p><p>Divided into easily digested (sorry about that) chapters, &ldquo;Food, Inc.&rdquo; touches on hot-button issues facing the food industry and its customers.</p><p>&bull;Early on, Kenner&rsquo;s film crew visits a chicken farm. Thanks to modern chemistry, the time needed to raise a chicken from egg to table has been cut by a third. Growth of the chickens&rsquo; breasts &mdash; love that white meat! &mdash; so outpaces that of their bones and internal organs that the birds can take only a couple of steps before falling over.</p><p>In any case, modern chicken farming doesn&rsquo;t want them walking &mdash; they spend their brief lives crammed wing-to-wing in dark chicken factories, never seeing sunlight or smelling air not redolent of urine and feces. Yum.</p><p>Chicken grower Carole Morison takes us through her chicken building. It&rsquo;s nasty enough, but Tyson is demanding she build a new one with no windows. Morison declines, claiming it would be cruel and inhumane. Her Tyson contract was subsequently canceled.</p><p>&bull;We spend time with Barbara Kowalcyk, whose young son died from eating an E. coli-contaminated hamburger and who now devotes herself to working for tighter FDA and Department of Agriculture oversight. Problem is, the inspection program has been gutted over the last decade.</p><p>Asked how her own eating habits have changed as a result of her personal tragedy, Kowalcyk (a lifelong Republican) declines to answer. Unlike Oprah she hasn&rsquo;t the means to fight a libel lawsuit by the cattle industry. </p><p>&bull;&ldquo;Food, Inc.&rdquo; argues that public policy often discourages good eating. By subsidizing corn and soybean production the government makes the products made with those crops (which is to say darn near everything processed and packaged) way cheaper than fresh produce.</p><p>The film follows a family whose members can eat cheaper at a fast-food burger joint than by buying the ingredients for a salad.</p><p>&bull;Late in the movie Kenner turns to genetically modified crops, particularly Monsanto&rsquo;s Roundup Ready soybeans, which resist herbicides that kill nearby weeds. The film&rsquo;s concern is less about health issues with such crops as with the company&rsquo;s overwhelming dominance in soybean production and its relentless pursuit of farmers who violate their contracts by attempting to save seeds from one harvest to replant next year.