Unser Täglich Brot is a documentary by Nikolaus Geyrhalter about food production.
It has no interviews, no comments, no music, and yet it’s absolutely brilliant!
In cinemas in the UK on the 25/01/08.
This is a shocking documentary about how we produce food in our modern age. Most of it is unbelievable and disgusting, yet the disturbing thing is: some of it is quite beautiful. There’s this scene which has a huge field with wind turbines scattered over it. There’s something smooth and calm about it. Then a big potato collection machine enters which gives the whole scene an incredible sense of automation. It reminded me of a spice harvester in Dune.
Actually this is the main impression that the movie conveys: automation. This is science fiction, except this is not a fiction, this is real.
Some of it is very cruel (or rather shows cruel things), obviously it has to do with animal handling. There is an interesting scene in which you see a cow tied up to some sort of pillar. Behind the cow, a whole line of bulls, all of them completely oversized, with bulging muscles. As a side note, I live in the countryside where cattle is bred on grassy fields so I know how a normal cow looks like. These bulls have obviously been bred with growth hormones to reach this sort of size.
Each bull is presented behind the cow, to make them mate. None of this is deliberate (it’s all automated, sort of), but I thought: well at least, they’re getting laid. So the bull climbs on the female’s back and right when he’s going in, a guy grabs his penis and puts it in a bag to collect the sperm.
Growth hormones and sperm leeching.
There is this other scene involving humans this time. It’s not very clear where it is, probably somewhere in Eastern Europe. The camera follows a crew of asparagus pickers. There’s a huge field and quite a few employees scattered all over. At some point you see the farmer (or some kind of supervisor) who’s checking on his employees with binoculars. I would suggest they build a little mirador for him. You half expect the guy to grab a sniper rifle to shoot the lazy butts in his crew.
I think one of the most bizarre machines that I’ve seen in this documentary (along with the mysterious pig killing machine) is one designed to shake olive trees. It is a very weird thing. It’s a mechanical arm attached to the front of a tractor that reaches to the base of the tree. It then vibrates the tree, a bit like a mobile phone on silent mode, only a lot more violent, obviously. The whole tree shakes like a leaf (that fits, for a tree) and the olives fall to the ground.
The director has definitely kept the worst and the most disgusting for the end. We find ourselves in a cow slaughterhouse. Each cow is pushed inside a booth with an open end. First thing the cow sees is the dangling body of the previous cow that has just been stunned.
It’s obvious they know what’s coming to them, they shake badly when the guy walks up to them with the stun gun. Then a guy with a sharp knife severs the main arteries in the cow’s neck and, literally, a torrent of blood comes down. You can also see some yellowish liquid coming out of the nose and mouth of the cow, I’m not sure what it is but the whole things is very very disgusting. So that’s how a cow dies. I knew exactly how it was done, except watching it for real on the screen is different from being told or reading about it.
Surprisingly enough, I haven’t seen the mention “No animals were hurt” in the end credits.
Those are not cattle who have been implant with growth hormones, but rather a double muscled breed like the piedmontese.