The first section of the movie criticizes the current cultivation techniques of farm animals that are only concerned with growing and stuffing them fatter and quicker. Anymore, animals are so far removed from their natural environment, the way thousands of cows are crowded on vast stretches of flat, lifeless land and chickens are packed into lightless hotboxes, they're treated more like meat machines than sentient beings. The fact that runaway capitalism has led us to this point, that animals are degraded to the basest level of commodity, is the reason I'm a vegetarian, and I found it to be an incredibly persuasive argument.
The second section of the movie examines how U.S. government subsidies to corn and soy have transformed the international food economy. Genetically modified corn derivatives are contained within the overwhelming majority of all processed food and animal feed, and they're not that healthy. Even worse, we've exported it to other countries and devastated local economies, forcing them into dependency on our dirt cheap corn. This argument was effective because it compares the natural way of agriculture of the past with the new, technocratic methods and explicitly demonstrates why they sacrifice environmental sustainability and nutrition for profit.
The third section of the movie deals with the legal and economic power of the country's biggest food industry corporations. They've been consolidating and building wealth, bullying local farmers into debt schemes and scaling back their rights in the name of intellectual property (Monsanto's terminator seeds). Americans are eating more and more of this unhealthy food because it's marketed to them, and the country is still trying to figure out why there is a a growing obesity problem.
All three of these main arguments within the movie are framed in such a way that we are able to see the disparity between ways of the past and ways of today, and big corporations are meticulously skirting the well being of humans and animals in exchange for bigger profits. This rhetorical technique leads me to believe that the information in this documentary is so current that not enough people have yet heard how the food industry has changed the way they eat.
