PopTech 2009 kicked off its three days of talks yesterday morning with speaker Kurt Andersen (remember SPY magazine?), the host of Studio360 who has “turned his indefatigable curiosity to examining everything from 19th-century health farms to the dot.com boom to Mick Jagger’s resemblance to Don Knotts.” Other speakers scheduled for today and tomorrow include a US Air Force National Security Advisor, a behavioral economist, the NY Times perfume critic, a YouTube Phenomenon (yes, that’s a capitalized job title now) and a select handful of architects, geneticists, researchers, musicians, writers (like Michael Pollan, author of “Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and the women who created anthropomorphic robots – and you can watch it all happen live.

E. coli? Obesity? Illegal immigration? Hardly a day goes by, it seems, when one of these issues doesn’t appear somewhere in the news. The new documentary film Food Inc. does something that few in the mainstream media have tried with these issues: it demonstrates how they’re all connected to our food system, and the mass production methods that now dominate food processing in the United States.

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