In a weird form of kismet, at the same moment the hit movie about the industrial food system, Food, Inc., was seeing its nationwide release (total revenues as of June 28: $835,000), the US Department of Agriculture announced the recall of 421,000 pounds of ground beef that was potentially contaminated with E coli 0157:H7—a toxic bacterium that can cause violent stomach distress, permanent renal failure, and death. And it's even worse than it sounds: As Obama Foodorama points out, recalls are voluntary, and there's no way to tell where any of the beef actually is.

E coli 0157:h7 comes up frequently in Food, Inc., a damning indictment of an industrial food system that exploits animals, workers, farmers, and consumers alike.

Although the film covers much of the same ground as the books written by two of its creators, Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma)—the concentration of the food industry into ever fewer hands, the industrialization of every aspect of food production, and so forth—even dedicated locavores and Pollanites will learn something they didn't know.

Some of Food, Inc. will be familiar ground for those who've read anything about the changes in the food system that took place during the last century (as Pollan says in the movie's introduction, the way we produce food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000). Chickens have been bred to grow faster and have ridiculously large breasts to accommodate the American taste for white meat. Much of our food, as Pollan puts it, are "clever rearrangements of corn"—a point that was exhaustively discovered in last year's acclaimed film King Corn. The hides of cows in crowded concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) end up caked with manure, which is how manure—and bugs like e. Coli—get into food. Organics companies are increasingly collaborating with megacorporations like Wal-Mart, raising fears that they'll water down their standards to compete on the national and international markets.

But there are surprises—stories by turns poignant, heartbreaking, and hopeful. The Hispanic family with two kids, a diabetic husband, and 16-hour workdays who lack time and money for anything more nutritious than $2 meals at McDonalds. The parents whose last memories of their two-year-old, killed by E. coli poisoning from a tainted Jack-In-the-Box hamburger, are of their son begging for water because he was so dehydrated from his illness. ("All I wanted the company to do was say, 'We're sorry,' and they couldn't even do that," the boy's mother, Barbara Kowalcyk, says.) And the chicken farmer who works as a contractor for massive poultry firm Perdue, driven into debt and forced into practices she knows are wrong (raising chickens in crowded conditions with no light and air, pumping poultry full of antibiotics to keep them alive),  just to stay in business.

"This isn't farming, it's just mass production," the farmer, Carole Morison, says, gesturing around her chicken house at birds that are too top-heavy or sick to stand (in spite of frequent injections of antibacterial drugs that have made Morison allergic to all antibiotics.) "I have no say in my business. It's degrading. It's like being a slave to the company," Morison says. The typical farmer, the filmmakers, carries about $500,000 in debt, most of it from the expensive equipment companies require as a condition of their contracts—and makes about $18,000 a year. After refusing to "upgrade" to more "modern" chicken houses that lack any light and are ventilated by tunnels, Perdue declined to renew Morison's contract.

Food, Inc. is agitprop with a purpose. It's a compelling call to consumers to change the way we eat, but also, more importantly, to the government to change what we tolerate in food production. It's an important movie for anyone who eats food to watch.