At the Movies: My "Review" of Fed Up
Updated May 14

On Saturday night, May 10, I made the drive to downtown Washington, D.C. to see Fed Up on its opening weekend at the E Street Cinema. I opted to forego the Goobers and/or Raisinets!

I wasn’t expecting a big crowd, so I lingered in the lobby until it was almost show time.

Mistake!

I never sit in front at the movies, but the smallish theater was packed, and I had to shoehorn into a seat in the exact middle of the back row in the front section. Luckily, I was alone - there were only a few single seats open.

Apparently, my experience wasn’t unusual: the film “opened to a pleasing $130,000 from 18 theaters for an average of $7,200,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, and Fed Up’s distributor called those numbers “a solid opening across our core art markets, performing at the top of practically all engagements. Reviews are top notch and the film is a hot button issue on Capitol Hill as food industry lobbyists have come out swinging. We’re extremely encouraged and looking forward to expanding Fed Up into the heartland over the next couple weeks as well as launching a specially created Spanish language version targeted to Latino audiences.”

E Street, where I saw the film, has already extended Fed Up for another week, and a quick check of the other theaters where it opened last weekend indicates that it will play at least another week everywhere, as well as opening at a few dozen more movie houses on May 16, and more still in the weeks to follow. It may even follow the pattern of An Inconvenient Truth and open much wider over the summer.

So get ready to welcome Fed Up to a theater near you - and, when it gets to your neck of the woods, I urge you to go see it. It’s entertaining, looks good, and moves very quickly, and I basically agree with its core message: that processed food - and particularly the sugar in all its myriad guises that’s added copiously to processed food to make it palatable - is primarily responsible for the epidemic of childhood (and adulthood) obesity in our country. According to Fed Up, we’re literally addicted to sugar. And our addiction is enabled by the processed food industry, Big Agriculture, Big Sugar, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the U.S. Government (via USDA), all in the name of imponderable profits and fat campaign donations.

You may or may not agree with this thesis, or you may fall somewhere in between, but the key issues for child nutrition professionals are (1) to what degree does the film implicate school meals in the crisis it identifies and examines; and (2) how should you respond to any potential fallout directed your way? I’ll deal with the second of these points in the “Best Advice” and “Talking Points” sections of this Strategy Brief, but here let me talk about the content of the film as it relates to School Meals. (I’ll leave the full-scale critical reviews to the professionals -- go here to see all of the critical reviews in a single web site.)

The film’s direct examination of food served at schools is a very small portion of the film - just a few minutes really. But in that short time, the filmmakers and writers manage to interject several misleading (and possibly false?) premises. They claim that 50% of public schools serve commercial fast food; they intone that 80% of schools have a deal with Coke or Pepsi; and they vilify the typical public school as a “7-11 with books.”

All of these assertions are made while showing clips of kids in cafeterias and food being dished up on school serving lines (keep an eye out for our “DON’T4GET!” new regs banner, which, much to my shock and surprise, shows up twice in this section of the movie -- looking colorful and fantastic, I might add!). The basic dishonesty here is the conflation of School Meals with food that’s available at schools. Child Nutrition Programs that are on the NSLP can’t and don’t have deals with soft drink companies - school principals do. Some programs might occasionally menu commercial fast food, but not as many as when I started in the business 20+ years ago, and NOWHERE NEAR 80%. And the offerings on a typical school lunch line look nothing like the junk food gauntlet kids and families run at convenience stores like 7-11.

OK, so what the film really means is that kids can get fast food and some form of soft drink products at some schools. But when the filmmakers make this claim while showing school cafeterias, the visual image strongly suggests that this is happening in your lines. This is misleading at best, and downright false at worst.

Beyond the brief section that deals directly with School Meals, however, there is an undercurrent throughout the film that business and government are killing our kids with sugar and schools are part of this unholy partnership. The movie follows several very overweight young teens as they try to lose weight, and food at school is mentioned more than once as one of their problems. Importantly for us and our response, since added sugar is the prime dietary villain here, the most recent changes to school meal requirements only address the villain indirectly (the new regs lower calories in the meals, so added sugar can’t help but be reduced, but added sugar is not specifically addressed or limited by the new regs).

It’s a movie worth seeing for anyone, and a must see for everyone in our industry. You can’t respond to misleading attacks unless you know what they are!

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