Background
Updated May 14

The feature-length documentary Fed Up debuted to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2014.  Here’s how the movie is described on the official Sundance page for the film:

“Upending the conventional wisdom of why we gain weight and how to lose it, Fed Up unearths a dirty secret of the American food industry—far more of us get sick from what we eat than anyone has previously realized. Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig and TV journalist Katie Couric lead us through this potent exposé that uncovers why—despite media attention, the public’s fascination with appearance, and government policies to combat childhood obesity—generations of American children will now live shorter lives than their parents did.”

The film, which hit selected theaters on May 9, has come to be referred to as the “childhood obesity” movie and the “added sugar” movie, and indeed it does lay the blame for the epidemic of the former on the pervasiveness of the latter in our food supply.  

The biggest targets of the film are Big Agriculture (especially Big Sugar), the processed food industry, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the food policy makers in the U.S. Government, particularly the USDA.  The School Nutrition programs (or, more accurately, the food that’s available at schools) come in for some share of the scrutiny/criticism.

The people involved in making the film gave it added visibility when it premiered at Sundance, and they continued to keep it in the news leading up to its theatrical release: well-known TV personality Katie Couric narrated the film, and some of the producers also helped make An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore climate change documentary and one of the most high-profile documentaries of the last decade.

An Inconvenient Truth debuted at Sundance in 2006, was purchased for distribution at the festival, and was released in New York and Los Angeles in May of that year. It became a critical and financial success, gaining wider release nationwide in the summer and going on to gross $50 million worldwide and staying in the news for more than a year after its Sundance debut, finally winning the Academy Award for best documentary feature in March 2007.

I’m giving you this background on that older film, because when Fed Up first popped up on our radar screen in January, I suggested to our subscribers that this film could well follow the same trajectory as An Inconvenient Truth.

So far, that prediction has held true. Fed Up was purchased for distribution at the Sundance festival, and it is slated for release on Friday, May 9. The release will be wider than just New York and L. A., but it is still limited to certain cities and will be gradually rolled out to other areas in the weeks to come.  As of week 2, every theater that opened the movie last week will still be showing it for at least one more week, and three dozen or so other theaters will begin showing the film on Friday, May 16.  Please go here to see the current release schedule.

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