Holding Health at Gunpoint

As documentaries go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more
one-sided than Farmageddon. A labor of
love by director Kristin Canty—whose son’s asthma was cured by drinking raw,
unpasteurized milk—this look at the government’s interference with small,
organic farmers and co-ops paints a Soviet Union picture of greedy, soulless
politicos and the saintly people of the earth they target.

Organized as a series of stories about government
nightmares, Farmageddon recounts stories
of healthy sheep being shepherded away for incineration, families held at
gunpoint by SWAT teams for hours while they cart away the contents of a private
co-operative and gallons of milk being poured out on the side of the road.
Never mind that the raw milk in question was being transported across state
lines, a federal violation; Canty and her subjects are righteously indignant
that the United States of America should uphold its own laws so rigorously.
Instead of positioning themselves as petitioners to change the Draconian laws
regulating raw milk, everyone here just wants to complain about the unfairness
of it all.

The organic food movement is one that looks permanent, and a
documentary about smaller farms competing with large corporations should be a
no brainer. But everything about Canty’s film feels so childishly outraged—from
her high school-level narration to the total lack of talking heads representing
the major food industry players—that her passion has the opposite effect: We
find ourselves rolling our eyes at the men and women recounting the destruction
of their livelihood for what seems to them arbitrary reasons.

No Impact Man, a 2009
doc about one man’s journey to radically reduce his family’s carbon footprint,
earned a lot of mockery with its portrayal of a marriage straining under the
strictures set forth by its patriarch—particularly his insistence on banning
toilet paper from their home. But that movie also discussed the qualms some
dairy farmers have about being certified organic, which prevents the use of
antibiotics on their herds. When their cows become sick, they are unable to
give them medicine, and must instead watch their cattle suffer. Farmageddon doesn’t have time for such nuances; Canty and her
team are too busy creating an Orwellian portrait of government interference and
the trials and tribulations of a bunch of people who just want to be a little
healthier. For a film about the benefits of natural food and raw milk, there is
ironically nothing organic about Farmageddon.

Farmageddon

Directed by Kristin Canty

Running time: 90 min.