In Food, Inc., filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the veil on our nation's food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government's regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA. Our nation's food supply is now controlled by a handful of corporations that often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihood of the American farmer, the safety of workers and our own environment. We have bigger-breasted chickens, the perfect pork chop, herbicide-resistant soybean seeds, even tomatoes that won't go bad, but we also have new strains of E. coli—the harmful bacteria that causes illness for an estimated 73,000 Americans annually. We are riddled with widespread obesity, particularly among children, and an epidemic level of diabetes among adults.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield's Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms' Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it's produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

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Without words, cameras show us the world, with an emphasis not on "where," but on "what's there." It begins with morning, natural landscapes and people at prayer: volcanoes, water falls, veldts, and forests; several hundred monks do a monkey chant. Indigenous peoples apply body paint; whole villages dance. The film moves to destruction of nature via logging, blasting, and strip mining. Images of poverty, rapid urban life, and factories give way to war, concentration camps, and mass graves. Ancient ruins come into view, and then a sacred river where pilgrims bathe and funeral pyres burn. Prayer and nature return. A monk rings a huge bell; stars wheel across the sky.

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As we enter the 21st century, serious questions are beginning to emerge about the sustainability of the suburban way of life.

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Visually stunning portrait of our planet and our impacts on it.  French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has managed to capture the awe, natural wonder and raw spectacle of the world around us.  Since his photographic exhibition first opened in Paris, 2000, Earth From Above has toured more then thirty countries and been seen by over fifty million people.  This film invites the viewer to reflect on the changes taking place on our planet, and the repercussions of these changes on future inhabitants. One by one, the stunning images reveal not only the beauty of the Earth, but also the impact we ourselves have made on our fragile planet.

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Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky posits that man made landscapes define who we are as people. He sees a certain physical beauty in the order and/or symmetry in some of these landscapes, despite the negative reasons for them or the subsequent degradation they pose to the environment and people around them.

Follow him as he visits what he calls manufactured landscapes: slag heaps, e-waste dumps, huge factories in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of China, and a place in Bangladesh where ships are taken apart for recycling. In China, workers gather outside a factory, exhorted by their team leader to produce more and make fewer errors. A woman assembles a circuit breaker, and women and children are seen picking through debris or playing in it. Burtynsky concludes with a visit to Shanghai, the world's fastest growing city, where wealth and poverty, high-rises and old neighborhoods are side by side.

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TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. We've selected a range of eco-related talks from the collection. TED is a powerful forum for new ideas - some of them are inspiring, others are scary...

William McDonough
Green-minded architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account "all children, all species, for all time."

He believes that green design can prevent environmental disaster -- while also driving economic growth. He champions “cradle to cradle” design

Jamie Oliver
Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in USA, TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

Jamie Oliver is transforming the way we feed ourselves, and our children.

Bill Gates
At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world once, while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. He plans to do it again...

Mark Bittman
In this fiery and funny talk, New York Times food writer Mark Bittman weighs in on what's wrong with the way we eat now (too much meat, too few plants; too much fast food, too little home cooking), and why it's putting the entire planet at risk.

Mark Bittman is a bestselling cookbook author, journalist and television personality. His friendly, informal approach to home cooking has shown millions that fancy execution is no substitute…

David Keith
Environmental scientist David Keith proposes a cheap, effective, shocking means to address climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight and heat?

David Keith studies our climate, and the many ideas we've come up with to fix it. A wildly original thinker, he challenges us to look at climate solutions that may seem daring, sometimes even crazy…

Rachel Armstrong
Venice is sinking. To save it, Rachel Armstrong says we need to outgrow architecture made of inert materials and, well, make architecture that grows itself. She proposes a not-quite-alive material that does its own repairs and sequesters carbon, too.

TED Fellow Rachel Armstrong researches "metabolic materials" -- construction materials that possess some of the properties of living systems, and can be manipulated to "grow" architecture.

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Garbage Warrior is a feature-length documentary film telling the epic story of maverick US architect Michael Reynolds and his fight to introduce radically sustainable housing. An extraordinary tale of triumph over bureaucracy, Garbage Warrior is above all an intimate portrait of an extraordinary individual and his dream of changing the world.

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From the food on our tables to the fuel in our cars, crude oil seeps invisibly into almost every part of our modern lives. It is the energy source and raw material that drives transport and the economy. Yet many of us have little idea of the incredible journey it has made to reach our petrol tanks and plastic bags.

Coming in the wake of rising global concerns about the continued supply of oil, and increasingly weird weather patterns, Crude spans 160 million years of the Earth's history to reveal the story of oil; from its birth deep in the dinosaur-inhabited past, to its ascendancy as the indispensable ingredient of modern life.

Filmed on location in 11 countries across five continents, the program's award-winning Australian filmmaker Richard Smith consults the leading international scientific experts to join the dots between geology and economy and provide the big-picture view of oil.

Crude takes a step back from the day to day news to illuminate the Earth's extraordinary carbon cycle and the role of oil in our impending climate crisis. Nearly seven billion people have come to depend on this resource, yet the Oil Age that began less than a century and a half ago, could be over in our lifetimes.

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