Austin film director Richard Linklater (of Slacker and Dazed and Confused, two quintessentially Austin films, and the recent P.K. Dick flick A Scanner Darkly) has just made a movie about Fast Food Nation. Here he's talking about cattle ranchers in Colorado:

A lot of the people I met are the kind of quote-unquote good guys, the ranchers who were doing grass-fed beef. They're being put out of business by the factory feed lots. There's two ways to do it—there's the healthy way for the cows, for the environment, for the user at the end, not to have food that's hormone and antibiotic injected. There's that version, and then there's the factory feed lot model that seems to be winning, and that's where it gets dangerous.

Exclusive: Filmmaker Richard Linklater Source: Edward Douglas, Comingsoon.net, November 10, 2006

What to do?

Linklater continues:

It would be great if consumers made the difference. So we were often dealing with the ranchers, who I actually have a lot of respect for. These guys are good stewards of the land, they care about their animals and the quality, but they're being put out of business by this other model that I've always been critical of. We have this myth in our head of "Oh, there's a family farm and crops and cows and pigs and chickens running around" and that's where your food comes from. Once you realize it's factories producing these things in really inhumane, horrible environments, that's when you go, "Okay, I don't want to support that but I'll support maybe those guys."

Maybe his movie will help dispell that myth. It opens Friday 17 Nov; sounds worth seeing.

-jsq