Our Daily Bread

The image above is one of a number of disturbing and oddly aesthetic stills from Our Daily Bread, a new documentary from Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Check here for scheduled U.S. showings.

The promo materials describe the film this way:

Welcome to the world of industrial food production and high-tech farming! To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

OUR DAILY BREAD is a wide-screen tableau of a feast which isn’t always easy to digest - and in which we all take part. A pure, meticulous and high-end film experience that enables the audience to form their own ideas.

I can't say for sure, but I sort of doubt documentary makers would have even been allowed access to a factory hog farm in the U.S.

In contrast to the creepy vibe these images convey, I want to mention "Mystery Meat," Heidi Julavits' account of the borderline obsessive lengths to which she went to cook every last bit of a split quarter of Belted Galloway beef she and her husband purchased last summer. I hope the article hasn't vanished behind the firewall. It was terrific. Here's a brief excerpt:

Before tackling the weird cuts, we do a bit of research. What is the difference between top round, bottom round, eye-of-round, rump, chuck, London broil? These answers are strangely hard to come by, given that the terms have changed, as small-town butchers have been replaced by packing plants and as consumers like me have become increasingly parts-ignorant. Sorting through the contradictory advice of beef authorities is a head-twisting experience much akin to reading books on infant sleep theory. Julia Child and Simone Beck provide an interesting entry point in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” though they spend most of their time translating French cuts like entrecôte into America-speak, or former America-speak. (An entrecôte is like a Delmonico or a club steak, they tell us. Huh? Give or take, they’re both a rib-eye.)

I was happy to read a piece like this in the New York Times Style section, from a highly regard novelist and literary celeb (and talented and funny writer). To me, this article dovetails nicely with a recent oral history I'm feeling a little guilty about keeping off the shelves of the Lexington public library, Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms, 1920-1950 by John and Anne Van Willigen.

I guess the techniques discussed therein on making beaten biscuits don't seem on first glance to have much to do with the Julavits' series of efforts at preparing their bottom round (on three successive nights they went three different international marinades--first adobo, then a Vietnamese effort featuring fish sauce, and lemongrass, and finally a Korean bulgogi preparation), but in my mind they have everything to do with one another.

I will try to articulate just how that works at some later date, but for now I'm tired and want to recommend both the Julavits story and Food and Everyday Life on Kentucky Family Farms....