Our Daily Bread Essay

Our Daily Bread, as the title suggests this is not about bread, as I hoped it was. Rather it’s about people earning their bread, their livelihood. The term ‘bread’ is derived from the larger term ‘bread-winner’ as the one who is the primary provider of the household, and the ‘daily bread’ is simply referring their daily livelihood. As my time spent in the US, I often used to wonder how the different food companies were able to produce mass amount of food to keep the population fed. This movie is the answer and the revelation of how food is produced in Europe and the Western hemisphere. The film starts off as we get a glimpse of daily sanitation rituals being carried off at a meat farm. The different scenes show us to transportation of livestock, machine assisted watering of plants, and a conveyor belt at a poultry farm where they separate the males from the female chickens (I know this as I have seen this done before in a different settin g). The machinery at poultry farm shows precision and efficiency as it sorts the young chicks into moving bins. The vaccination routine is also machine assisted which increases efficiency and production for the poultry farm. After few seconds, the young chicks have grown and we are shown the worker feeding them. The shot transitions into a break room where the worker is on a break with bread and tea, all alone. Next, we get the scene from a vegetable farm. A tractor picks the potatoes from the ground. Next shot, the workers prepare and wear protective gears to apply pesticides and fertilizers to the plants. But most of the work is done by machine assistance, needing almost no human intervention. It seems as the vegetables are being grown inside a greenhouse setting which allows vegetables to be grown all year long, without any weather restrictions. The only human labour being done is picking of the ripened vegetables. After work, the worker seem to be enjoying a small break, again alone. Now we see a bull and a cow where it seems breeding is in process. A closer look and we find that the workers are actually collecting the sperm. We find the sperm is transferred to medical examinations, I don’t kn ow exactly why but possibility could be to efficiently use the sperms to fertilize every fertile egg they can afford without any loss. And of course, we see a healthy calf being born. But it is pretty amusing to see how the cow was cut open and the calf was pulled out, how could that really be possible? How much medication could the animal be on since it wasn’t moving or making any noise as such? And are there any advantages of this type of birth for animal? Next, we see a series of shots of men in tractors who are doing farm work with machine assistance. This shows the efficiency that is earned by machine which helps humans achieve more with less time spent and more time to spend on luxury, or more work. We return back to the poultry farm, the egg farming room to be exact. The eggs are hatched and due to the design, they are conveniently accessible by the farmers to pick. A worker is shown to be holding a chicken as he walks around the egg farm, possibly to warn other hens who don’t lay eggs. In actual note, he maybe was checking for chickens which are dead. In the next shot, the workers are transported to a huge plantation to harvest crops growing under the ground, only time where tractors aren’t used. This is possibly the first time where machine use is limited to just watering the plants. Now we are shown our way to a pig farm. They are transported on a line into a machine where they are slaughtered by a machine. The human labour is limited to keep the line moving and in order. The machines are also used for most of the heavy work as boiling the skin and dissecting the pigs open. The human job is limited to cleaning up whatever else the machines may have left out and separating internal parts. We are also shown the marvel of modern technology with a biplane is used to fertilize the crops. There are also shots of heavy machinery usage in farms. Then we see a moving harvest truck where the outside workers are picking the vegetables and inside simply packaging them . Now we move to a cow-ranch. The cows are milked by machines in a rotating carousel. The cows don’t seem to mind so much, as it seems to be part of their daily routine. Next, a visit to the deep underground salt mines where machines are used to do most of the heavy work such as carrying out the salt from place to place and outside the mine itself. A transition moves from underground to underwater as we see a fish-farm where hundreds and hundreds of fishes are seen in a small area. This also makes it easier for the huge pipe to suck out the fishes from the water and into the boat. They are transported to a factory where humans align the fishes to feed into the machines. Apparently the machines haven’t learned to distinguish the fish head from the tail, yet. The fishes are cut and cleaned by series of machines and then moved onto another human where he puts them on another machine to move them to another section. Here, the worker seems pretty bored of the routine task he h as, perhaps feeling like the machine at this point because of his job task. Next we see bunch of workers cleaning the fish for final prep before shipping them out. Now we come to a pig-farm. The two series of shots seems interesting as the first represented insemination of pigs by tube and next shows the piglets born in captivity, just like ‘The Matrix’. Just like in the movies, they grow up and the next shot seems as if the male pigs were being castrated. One can only understand why so, as they don’t want to overproduce and give out the employees any bonuses. Or maybe not. The next series of shots show how chicken and cattle are prepared for consumption; as they are killed by the machines with little or less human effort required in the process. The final shot shows the end of the day routine- how everything is cleaned and sanitized for the next day of work. Despite all this, the workers in all places couldn’t wait for their daily bread, their hard earned break from their work. Perhaps the routine manner of their tasks has become so innate to them that they don’t seem to mind how their own food is being produced. For me, it was a bit amusing and shocking to see the conditions of animals but maybe after a few more views, I wouldn’t mind it either. This movie shows the heavy usage of machinery used in the production of food, be it salt, pigs, chicken, vegetables, fish, or pigs. It was also amusing, in a way, to see how breeding had gone into the next level by scientific usage to effectively get their result financially and also in economic ways to feed the ever growing world population. It seemed as almost if humans were not the only ones alienated from nature, but also the animals which were being artificially inseminated and mutilated against their wills. The workers didn’t seem to care much for what they were doing either, as long as it made their breads. It seemed as they had been trained to do this for so long that they were used to it- like machines with machine hearts and machine minds. In another view, the unnatural size of the bulls in the breeding house seemed as if they were so-much genetically engineered to produce the maximum amount of meat possible. Perhaps they had mixed something in the dry grass that was being blown into their small cages they were put-in. The growing population also has seemed to affect the unnatural process by which plants were grown with usages of pesticides and fertilizers. The use of greenhouses portrays, in a way, the plant’s alienation from nature as it was now possible to grow all plants in any weather or conditions. The absence of narration or subtitles leaves the movie-watcher to make their own conclusion and perspective. The filmmaker, as I understand, doesn’t want to change our habits but simply be aware of the ways in how the planet is being fed. If anything, this should be seen by as many people as possible to make them aware of the status of food production and the status of the subjects which are involved in the food production i.e. humans, plants and animals alike. I must say some of the scenes in the movie are quiet disturbing but that is the current status of our population and food production required to feed them.