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Reviews

Sep 8th 2008 By Total Film

There’s no dialogue in Our Daily Bread. No voice-over, no music. Just long-held, mainly static shots of the huge mechanised, industrial processes that provide us with the food that fills our supermarket shelves. Vast sheds packed with chickens recede into infinity. Conveyor belts spew out live chicks like bullets, or efficiently kill, gut and dismember cows and pigs. Huge fields are ploughed and harvested by monster machines. There’s something of an awful, hypnotic fascination in these images. Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s award-winning doc doesn’t preach or hector, Michael Moore-style; there are no sermons in favour of organic farming or vegetarianism. It simply shows us what happens in the agribusiness industry each day all over the developed world – in order to provide us with a cheap and abundant food supply – and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. Be warned, though: the pig-processing plant could put you off pork chops for life. No extras.