It’s difficult to describe what’s more irritating about A Place at the Table: The fact that it’s another agitprop documentary in an age of agitprop documentaries (Super Size Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Food, Inc.), that its music irritates so much somehow (despite the presence of T-Bone Burnett), or that, ultimately, its subject matter is so engaging.

This documentary is, like a lot of documentaries lately, about something related to our diet. Or in this case, the lack of a proper diet: Hunger.

According to A Place at the Table, 50 million people, including one in four children, don’t know when they’re going to eat next. America! Fuck, yeah!

And here are the same stories: Farm subsidies make it easier for agribusiness to grow certain products (say, corn, which can be made into just about anything) rather than others (say, broccoli, which tends to stay broccoli).

And then there’s us, the people who let it happen. Know why? Because we let our government, which is in a state of bullshit, argue over the goddamn debt ceiling instead of demanding it get off its loathsome behind and do something.

Meanwhile, Rosie, Barbie and Tremonica are starving to death.

Greatest nation on earth my ass.

A PLACE AT THE TABLE
Directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush
CCA Cinematheque
84 min.
PG