Our Daily Bread provides a visual and thought provoking experience unmatched within the constant growing trend of food documentaries. Rather than being another common type food documentary, it allows you to focus on the facts as if you were witnessing them yourself first hand. Instead of sourceless claims and manipulated data and statistics, everything is there in plain view for you to see and interpret yourself. Exactly how it should be. It may be boring for people who want to passively sit and absorb information thoughtlessly, but for real people, this offers an alternative rarely found in documentaries; a near objective look of a subject matter within a film. No dark ominous tones, no deceptive editing, no subjective opinions, and no agenda driven points. Just a camera filming the reality of its subject un-skewed and unaltered. Unlike other documentaries, you won’t have your heart strings pulled by staged emotional twists, the truth is enough. In Our Daily Bread, the truth is documented opinion-less, and the viewer is left to form his own. Crude and vulgar at times, it is only the reality of large scale food production and processing revealing itself.

All of the footage is from countries around Europe. Its subject matter is the industrialized food industry and its process of maintaining efficiency. It gradually pushes through different types of food: meats, vegetables, nuts, salt and does so with a certain appealing experimental style. It holds exceptional cinematography, with some scenes that are truly incredible and unforgettable. The mining and excavation (of salt I believe) deep underground is a good example of this. All in all, many interesting methods and techniques are shown for collecting, picking and dealing with food on a large scale.

The indifferent monotonous routine that each of the employees exhibits is dehumanizing. Memorable indifference is shown in these examples:

• Vacuuming out the intestinal leftovers of a pig carcass
• The second by second shear removal of freshly cut in half pig carcass feet.
• Piglet tail clipping.
• Chicken throat slitting, convulsing while being hung from legs and bleeding to death on assembly line.
• Cow slaughtering – personally the most impactful part of this film – the absolute horror of the cow killing and processing scenes, shooting cows in the head with some mechanism, followed by gallons of blood pouring out and other excrement like substances pouring out the facial area

It’s not the brutality of these scenes that makes it so bone chilling, but the indifference shown by the employees taking part.

The only reason this is not a 5/5, and really my only issue with the film whatsoever is the employee scenes. We get the point, we understand what is trying to be shown. It does not have to be 10 different employee scenes minutes long of someone eating a sandwich slowly. Sort of unnecessary droning. -1 point. 4/5.

Conclusion: I am physically Ill. Screw all these other agenda driven food documentaries, this one takes the cake.