The Future of Food

In the documentary The Future of Food, a female narrator with a calm, pleasant voice explains the process and problems of food modification. Her calm might help viewers not totally freak out watching the film. Just as crop pesticides produced unexpected consequences far different from their benign intentions, the genetic modification of food could also have unintended side effects. “This is probably the largest biological experiment humanity has ever entered,” expert Ignacio Chapela says in the film. To make matters scarier, many of the new genes and plants are controlled by large companies seeking to corner the market with patents. The filmmakers interview farmers from Canada and Mexico who have been adversely affected by the practice — a Canadian man, for instance, was sued when a resistant canola strain popped up among his crops, because a company technically owns the patent to the resistant gene. Learn more about the problem and what to do about it today at
Wed., Oct. 10, 7 p.m., 2007