Our Daily Bread

Despite the title, there’s not much spirituality to Our Daily Bread. When providing food for billions of people, creating a simplified routine is key.

With dispassionate and gorgeously composed HD photography reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick, Geyrhalter pays tribute to the men and women performing backbreaking and at times stomach-churning jobs, and provides wry commentary on how ingenious the food industry can be at rapid harvesting.

Ninety-two minutes long, but never boring, what sticks are individual shots and sequences. A machine shakes olives from a tree in seconds, rows of tomatoes in hangar-like greenhouses stretch off into the distance, and mammoth Terminator style machines harvest angelically yellow fields of wheat.

Placed amidst the vegetable gathering are scenes of animal harvesting that, while never gratuitous, require a stronger stomach. Chicks are sorted into chutes and shot out of high pressure funnels into waiting crates, piglets are castrated, salmon are gutted and vacuumed by three separate hoses and buzz saws disembowel row after row of pigs.

But, Geyrhalter isn’t out to make a vegetarian polemic, resisting easy editorialising and allowing audiences to reach their own conclusions.

These moments are merely part of a production line necessary for putting food on the table, although there are some darkly comic comparisons – apples tightly packed in crates, followed by hens tightly packed in battery farms, followed by people tightly packed on the bus home – and a cow panicking before receiving the bolt gun is guaranteed to upset.

The mechanized food industry may have attempted to remove the human touch, but the film closes each sequence with a worker taking a break, a reminder of what all this graft is for and that some things resist automation.

Brain food that’s sometimes hard to stomach, Our Daily Bread should be wolfed down with all due haste.