Inspiring in many different ways the second documentary of the day, Our Children Will Accuse Us (2008) wasn’t a disappointment. The documentary’s subject material deals with a small French community set at the foot of the Cvennes Mountains, whose Mayor is determined to make his community organic, from agriculture to plate.
What makes Our Children Will Accuse Us so inspiring are the facts it reveals pertaining to the logic of how we eat. When it comes to organic food in the grocery store the majority us who prefer to bypass organic food, due to its “hefty” sticker price, create a demand for pesticide laden foods instead. As one researcher states in the film these over chemisised foods costs are not properly represented in their price tag. The fact remains that our bills for chemo therapy and the subsidies given to farmers who grow shitty produce are never reflected therein. If they were properly priced with these after costs then organic foods would be the cheaper of the two. Another key point given upon the price tag of organic foods is that while perhaps it costs more one should just buy less, in effect also solving the problems and illnesses associated with over eating. Let’s not even get into the fact that organic tastes better.
The themes in the film are something I have advocated and stressed as my main reasons for becoming a vegetarian; that being said I don’t eat organically for the exact same faulty logic listed above, something the documentary has inspired me to change. There exists no reason, as the documentary states that cancer rates have sky rocketed 93% in the last 25 years, no reason beyond the perverse food chain we now have. I have always compared this process, and conceived of my “philosophy of food”, to the one reminiscent and present in Tim Burtons Batman (1989). The Joker products don’t kill anyone who uses just one product, but the combination of everything is what inevitably gives them that “dirt eating” grin. The same is true in real life.
