Film Review: "Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food" (2023).

From the director of Get Smart with Money comes Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food. This documentary film directed by Stephanie Soechtig, and based on the bestselling book Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat by Jeff Benedict. A shocking indictment of the food industry and its regulators, the film exposes how decades of apathy and malfeasance have left the American food supply and its consumers vulnerable to deadly pathogens like e. Coli and salmonella.

Escherichia coli is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus Escherichia that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms. Most E. coli strains are harmless, but some serotypes such as EPEC, and ETEC are pathogenic and can cause serious food poisoning in their hosts, and are occasionally responsible for food contamination incidents that prompt product recalls. Most strains are part of the normal microbiota of the gut and are harmless or even beneficial to humans (although these strains tend to be less studied than the pathogenic ones). For example, some strains of E. coli benefit their hosts by producing vitamin K2 or by preventing the colonization of the intestine by pathogenic bacteria. These mutually beneficial relationships between E. coli and humans are a type of mutualistic biological relationship — where both the humans and the E. coli are benefitting each other. E. coli is expelled into the environment within fecal matter. The bacterium grows massively in fresh fecal matter under aerobic conditions for three days, but its numbers decline slowly afterwards.

Salmonella is a genus of rod-shaped (bacillus) gram-negative bacteria of the family Enterobacteriaceae. The two known species of Salmonella are Salmonella enterica and Salmonella bongori. S. enterica is the type species and is further divided into six subspecies that include over two-thousand and six-hundred serotypes. Salmonella was named after Daniel Elmer Salmon (1850–1914), an American veterinary surgeon. Salmonella species are non-spore-forming, predominantly motile enterobacteria with cell diameters between about 0.7 and 1.5 μm, lengths from two to five μm, and peritrichous flagella (all around the cell body, allowing them to move). They are chemotrophs, obtaining their energy from oxidation and reduction reactions, using organic sources. They are also facultative anaerobes, capable of generating adenosine triphosphate with oxygen ("aerobically") when it is available, or using other electron acceptors or fermentation ("anaerobically") when oxygen is not available.

The film - a disturbing expose of the food industry - is essential watching. You need to see it. Take your kids. Take your neighbour's kids. Take a stranger's kids (well, maybe that's a bit much). As a piece of investigative journalism, it does a terrific job examining the real price paid for nice hamburgers, romain lettuce and chicken for all. This enlightening film takes aim at the US food industry by exposing the astounding and dubious means by which the source of our food is harvested and processed. Compelling, entertaining and illuminating documentary which makes you think twice, and then a few more times, about eating anything at all in U.S.

Simon says Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food receives:

Also, see my review for Get Smart with Money.