When I was a boy, my uncle's modestly sized farm in Albemarle County easily fed his family and produced enough meat and produce to sell the surplus to local markets.

Today, poor uncle Harold wouldn't stand a chance. Family farms like his have been gobbled up by an agricultural industry that is dominated by a handful of gigantic, merciless and super-secretive corporations.

This isn't exactly breaking news. What is news, at least to me, is just how corrupt the system really is and how much damage it inflicts on Americans.

The corporations bully small farmers into bankruptcy. They abuse both the animals they raise for sale and their own employees. They endanger the health of their customers. They shroud their operations in secrecy and punish whistle-blowers. They resist sanitation standards, and they are cozy bedmates with the government agencies that ought to be regulating them.

That, at least, is the point of view of "Food, Inc.," a horrifying documentary from director Robert Kenner. If there is a countervailing view, the corporations are keeping it to themselves. Neither Monsanto, Tyson, Perdue nor any of the other corporations cited in the movie consented to be interviewed for it.

The film is based in part on two well-known books: Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma." Both authors appear in the movie and load it with credibility. If you care at all about what you and your family are eating, and what that food may be doing to your health, "Food, Inc." is a must-see. Chances are good that afterward, you will change your eating and food-buying habits.

You might reconsider that alluring chicken breast when you learn that it came from a hormone-filled bird that goes from hatchling to slaughter in six weeks and in conditions devoid of daylight and enough space to walk around. Some of the birds get so fat they can't walk anyway.

You might think twice about eating beef from a Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) where penned cattle stand in their own waste and are force-fed corn instead of the grass for which their digestive systems are intended. The corn diet is cheaper, you see. It turns out that this protean plant is in an amazing 80 percent of the products on grocery shelves -- not always to healthful effect.

Part of "Food, Inc." is devoted to the heartbreaking story of a woman whose 2-year-old son was killed in 12 days by an E. coli infection that he contracted from tainted hamburger meat. That was in 2001. Eight years later, the proposed Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act (also know as Kevin's Law, named for the young victim) still has not passed. Nor has the boy's mother received so much as an apology from the meat-processing industry.

"Food, Inc." is a scary movie, but it's also a very saddening one. Saddening because it again exposes the runaway corporate greed with which Americans have become all too familiar. And because of its portrayal of a Congress too spineless even to protect us from the food we eat.