Sensationalizing Industrial Food in Documentary Film

Abstract

As a subset of food media meant to tantalize palates, food documentaries typically sensationalize the impoverished state of the entire food supply. This essay focuses on the food documentaries Hybrid (2000), King Corn (2007), Sunú (2015), and OMG OMG (2013), which variously treat “industrial food” as not an object of scorn but a useful category of resistance and engagement. When read through queer ecocritical and feminist materialist lenses, such films create an opening for ways of accounting for and living with the monstrosities of nature that typically arrest the gaze of sensationalism. These food films consider the family and the household not merely as units of passive consumption but as sites of considered provisioning that struggle to account for issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and ecological awareness in a world of ongoing environmental degradation.