A review of Super Size Me
Directed, Written and Produced by Morgan Spurlock

Seeing the long line-ups and sold-out crowds at documentary screenings in Toronto theatres is a heartening new phenomenon. The current hot ticket is Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, which has received glowing reviews and a director's award from this year's Sundance Festival.

As a film, Super Size Me is engaging and entertaining. In an attempt to test McDonald's claim that their food can be good for you - made in the midst of several lawsuits in 2002 - the film features Spurlock as his own test subject in a rather amusing experiment. After numerous tests and a clean bill of health from a doctor, cardiologist and gastroenterologist, Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald's for 30 days. In the rules he sets for himself, he has to eat every item on the menu at least once, super size his meal if he's asked, and he can't exercise more than the average American - which he tracks using a pedometer.

The result is a fair bit of gross humour and some horrifying, but hardly shocking, conclusions. By the third week, Spurlock is depressed and lethargic and his health has plummeted to the point that his doctors urge him to stop the experiment. By the end of the month he's experiencing headaches and extreme mood swings, his sex life is suffering and he's had to loosen his belt a few notches.

Scientifically credible or not, Spurlock gets you thinking. In the many interviews he features throughout the movie, with everyone from lawyers to doctors to nutritionists to school kids to fast food devotees, Spurlock explores the fast food industry's role in America's obesity epidemic.

In typical information overload, Spurlock gives us lots to chew on. He compares the millions of dollars that the fast food and candy industries spend on advertising and marketing to children, with the paltry amounts governments spend on healthy eating campaigns. He goes into the public school system to reveal the highly processed, fatty foods that schools get when they contract with the large industry food giants like Sodexho - and the healthier alternatives that are available from independent contractors at the same cost. He delves into the economic reality of working class Americans, where people spend most of their time at work and in the car, with barely enough time to cram in a burger at lunch, let alone make themselves a good meal. And he shows the irony in the millions of dollars that the diet and plastic surgery industries have raked in at the expense of Americans', and particularly American women's, anxiety about their weight.

So it's all there - the raw material for a truly anti-capitalist look at the fast food industry and corporate America's never-ending drive to put profits before the entire health of a nation. But Spurlock doesn't deliver. He doesn't end by urging parents to demand better school meal programs, or push governments to stop fast food's targeted marketing to kids, or even spark an outcry against the multi-million dollar diet industry. Instead, elated with the news that McDonald's is eliminating its Super Size meals and rolling out new, healthier menu options, Spurlock takes full credit and seems content to settle for the usual reforms that do nothing to challenge the system he spent an hour-and-a-half trying to expose. Even worse, in a gross objectification of (mostly women's) bodies, he shows numerous shots of overweight Americans and uses offensive "fat" songs to imply that the fast food industry is not the only villain.

So who is really to blame for America's obesity epidemic? Spurlock points squarely at Americans themselves and, if you follow his interviews to their logical conclusion, he seems to imply that the answer to a healthier lifestyle lies in providing better nutritional information, motivational speakers, or choosing the McDonald's salad instead of the Big Mac. But of course, life's more complicated than that. Healthy eating is expensive and poverty rates across America grow higher every year. Poor Americans don't have access to health care and the kind of preventive health information they need. The public school system is overwhelmed, underfunded and increasingly dependent on corporate donations, which makes it difficult to refuse corporations the contracts and student markets that they want in exchange.