The food industry does not want you to know what you’re eating, according to “Food Inc.” director Robert Kenner. 

Kenner and co-producer Melissa Robledo joined students over Zoom on Tuesday to discuss the Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning 2008 documentary “Food Inc.” 

Valerie Salinas-Davis, advertising and public relations assistant professor of instruction, hosted the panel. The event provided vegetarian pizza with specific instructions to compost the boxes at the end of the meeting. 

“Even though this is a film about food, it’s really a film about our democracy,” Kenner said. “The power of these companies has become so great.” 

The panel featured key interviews and clips from the documentary highlighting large corporations’s exploitation of workers and consumers within the food industry. According to the film, farmers use 30% of the land base in the U.S. to grow corn because the government pays them to overproduce the crop. Livestock are fed with cheap kernels to drive down the prices of meat.  

“When we went to film this, they were very proud of what they were doing with corn,” Kenner said. “But as we were starting to talk about how corn affected our diet, all of a sudden, the industry became very nervous about talking about it. … They’ve become a lot more guarded and a lot more uptight about it.” 

Zoey Kaul, a government and sustainability studies senior, presented her organization, Plant Futures, at the beginning of the panel. The organization aims to make the food system more sustainable.

 “It’s very hard for information about the system, the problems within it and the health issues that it causes, along with ethical concerns, to make it into the public sphere,” Kaul said. 

Kenner said large consolidated companies use intimidation tactics and the legal system to protect themselves. He said Empirical Foods, formerly named Beef Products Inc., took leftover remnants of beef and produced 80% of frozen hamburgers going into school systems.  

“(The meat) was filled with things that shouldn’t be there,” Kenner said. “The New York Times and ABC News picked (the story) up (and) both of them got sued, but we only used the words of the people at the company, so we got cease and desist notices for answering questions.” 

Robledo said when the film was created, it was unusual to know where your food was coming from, and big corporations attempted to obscure information about slaughterhouses. In 2023, the pair created a sequel to “Food Inc.” and found the industry had worsened. 

“Companies have outsized power to prevent consumers from getting information to manipulate prices, to exploit workers (and) to endanger the environment,” Robledo said.

Kenner began working on “Food Inc.” after reading Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation.” After receiving funding from Participant Media, he set out to create a documentary that illuminated the unethical farming practices and inhumane treatment of animals.

“I thought it was a metaphorical story about more than food,” Kenner said. “That’s what brought me to this. … It was a way of looking at the world through this … new, interesting lens.”