Rotten

Review of Season 2

Click here for a video version of this review: https://youtu.be/7KAmNIIaGDc

I really enjoyed the first season of Rotten on Netflix, so was pleasantly surprised to see a second season arrive. It's a documentary series that uses each episode to focus on one particular subject related to the darker underbelly of the food industry. In season two avocados, French wine, water, sugar, chocolate and weed edibles are the subjects covered.

Now, on the surface these might seem like boring subjects for a documentary, but the way the series and each episode is put together, it really gets you thinking about the everyday items that we take for granted, and how many of them often have a dark back story that we as the end user know nothing about. The series looks at these back stories and exposes how often huge corporations, or in the case of avocados, Mexican cartels, get involved and wring it out for massive profit - often at the cost of farmers, villages, towns, and the little people just trying to make an honest living.

I found this to be a fascinating insight, and a good reminder to be mindful of where my food and products come from. But that too also raises one little issue I had with it. At its core this a dump on huge corporations and the corruption and political influence that goes along with them. There is lots of exposing, but not so much offering of solutions, apart from the chocolate episode where they talked about moving a large part of the production into the hands of locals in Africa.

For me if there were some suggestions on solutions presented, it might have offered a bit of hope rather than being a bit depressing.

But overall they manage to effectively fit a lot of well researched information into each episode, they combine interviews, b-roll, and on-screen graphics well to get across their message. Season 2 was once again engaging and I'll be checking out the third if they make one.