I just saw this two days ago, so I’m what… like three years late to the hype around this movie? In other words, I got to see it outside of the hype-context, and I think my viewing benefited from that.

What I really think Spurlock seemed to be presenting was not a scientific test of the effect of a glut of McDonald’s food on the system, but really an excuse to analyze the MINDSET and OUTLOOK regarding food that we are/have been cultivating in this country. (And which, thanks to our corporate diplomacy, is now being cultivated in the rest of the world.) We’ve moved away from food being an itegral, sensual part of our lifestyle, to it being a matter of time and economics. And corporate America, or fast-food America, has both encouraged and exploited that drift.

As someone raised in an Italian home, eating home-cooked meals my entire life, and living with food as a very important, binding factor in my family, the notion of low-priced, quick, superficially-satisfying food was never really in my consciousness. But when you are watching television, and Kentucky Fried Chicken is pimping out its bucket of wings as a way to “bring the family back to dinner,” you know that we’re a long way from celebrating and being enriched and nourished by food in any way that makes sense.

That distortion in our relationship to food, it seems to me, is what Spurlock was really focusing on in this movie.