Super Size Me

Finally got around to seeing this documentary and loved it…but wanted to love it even more. There’s so much going these days in relation to America’s relationship with food: the growing obesity problem (especially among children), corporate exploitation of food for profit, governmental agencies like the FDA and USDA supporting corporations rather than educating consumers, corporate sponsored school meals, the never-ending diet mania, etc. and SSM only touched on these things tantalizingly briefly. I’m not sure how much of this stuff could have been explored more without disrupting the main narrative of Morgan Spurlock slowly killing himself with McDonald’s food, but a bit more substance would have been nice. Maybe co-writing the film with Eric Schlosser would have done the trick.

But still, for all the attention that Fahrenheit 9/11 received, the better documentary to open in the summer of 2004 was Super Size Me.