Food Inc. on WILL-TV

Food, Inc. reveals surprising — and often shocking truths — about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

This Academy-Award nominated documentary will make its broadcast debut on the PBS series POV this coming Wednesday, April 21. Tune in to WILL-TV at 8:00 p.m. CDT on your local cable or broadcast channel.



Food, Inc. will be accompanied by Notes on Milk, a short documentary which highlights little known facts about a favorite American beverage.

Interested in learning more about the film? Watch the trailer. Or, visit the movie's official website or the PBS POV website.

If you can't catch the POV screening on TV, you have other options to watch this significant and unsettling documentary. View Food, Inc. in its entirety online with streaming video for a limited time--April 22 through April 29, 2010.

The Urbana Free Library owns four copies of Food, Inc. on DVD. Place a hold and we'll notify you as soon as the film is available for you to take home.

You also can check out a print participant's guide: Food, Inc. : how industrial food is making us sicker, fatter, and poorer-- and what you can do about it, edited by Karl Weber.

The Messy Business of Democracy

PBS's award-winning series Frontline has produced a documentary on the recent health-reform legislation called Obama's Deal.

The program "reveals the dramatic details of how an idealistic president pursued the health care fight--despite the warnings of many of his closest advisers--and how he ended up making deals with many of the powerful special interests he had campaigned against."

The complete broadcast can be viewed online.

Most interesting are the widely diverging viewer comments in the site, expressing outrage (from both sides of the political aisle) about the legislation or the documentary's supposed biases; offering counter-perspectives (from other countries); and occasionally noting appreciation for what has been accomplished thus far.

A sample:

Although I'm in agreement with the notion that a nation as successful and capable as the United States should insure every American is provided with basic health care coverages and services, I detest how we got here, and do not believe that we have achieved "reform" in any serious regard. I have looked at the tea party uprisings in America with disdain and looked on in horror at how polarized we have become. Yet I also believe we should throw the whole Washington insider lot out and bring into lawmaking people who will put the interests of the American people first, and stop trying to protect their political careers and the interests of big Pharma, Insurance and health care providers. We seem to have totally lost our ability to "do the right thing" in Washington.

Watch it and decide for yourself.

Photo courtesy of marcn (CC BY 2.0).