This might be a film aliens exploring the human food system would produce. There is no dialogue, no explanations. Everything you see is repeated ten times. There is no particular order to what you see. There is no gross animal cruelty, just a clean, clinical, efficient Germanic lack of concern for animal welfare.
The silence and monotony gives a creepy feel about even things you might not normally consider sinister, like mining fertiliser. The sheer scale made me nauseous. The flow of pig, cow and chicken carcases goes on forever without pause. The hypnotic repetition creates a horrible inevitability.
Scenes that stick out: banks of chickens like inmates "heckling" two "guards" who walk down between the rows.
A cow that knows it is about to be killed and puts up a valiant attempt to escape.
A machine for vacuuming up chickens.
A Rube Goldberg contraption for gutting fish.
A man whose job is to mount fish on a sort of hobbyhorse to prepare them for further mechanised treatment. Hour after after he performs the same little grab and twist movement.
Men picking cabbages mounting in a frame that drives them at management's rate.
African immigrants without the money to buy the vegetables they grow in a greenhouse.
Casual calm castration, debeaking, slaughter and interfering with reproduction.
We humans have a sort of compact with domestic animals. We protect them from predators, we ensure they have food, we protect their health. In return they give us milk and meat. I think we are obligated to give them lives free from cruelty, reasonably close to life in the wild. But we have reneged. We care not a whit for their well being. Everything is for human convenience. We cheated. We ripped them off.
