IMDb photo

“Rotten” seasons one and two is a new docuseries (don’t be put off with that label, this is cinema) that you’re going to want to watch from start to finish, before you go to your market this week.

“Rotten,” a market place detective story about the food we eat and enjoy, started with season one hiding in plain sight on Netflix’s variety of documentaries.

Played out in amazing color, music and photography, it digs down into the secrets of our food supply chain, and exposes facts that are startling.

In season one’s “Lawyers, Guns and Honey” the creators reveal the explosive demand for honey, with the number of bees dying off in scary record breaking numbers.

It reveals the hidden secrets of “hive thefts,” and the international games being played to develop and hide the fraudulent tactics being used by China.

Is your honey, honey, or just “sugar syrup?”

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And garlic? Do you love those tiny knobs that some of you plant in your garden each year? Wait until you see the world of duplicity behind the billion dollar world of garlic. It will take your breath away.

You love avocados? Who doesn’t? Where do yours come from? The verdant fields in California, or the Mexican drug cartel-controlled groves of Mexico?

There are, you will learn, a curious little fruit in your hand is part of a multi-billion dollar-a-year industrial charade that involves death, theft and international intrigue.

That glass of chablis in your hand, the bottle of chianti on the shelf. How little, if anything, do you know about the journey they took to your table?

The show takes on sugar and chocolate, and OMG, what you will learn about the international world of chocolate — the slave world of the cocoa bean workers. You may never eat a Mounds bar again.

Bottled water? Maine takes center stage in this revealing segment. Behind that bottle you carry with you on your run or keep in the fridge lies a world of plots, hidden sources, duplicity.

“Rotten” is no hour-long travelogue of “how things are made.” You learn all of that, but get to see how, in the process of putting peanuts, coffee, fruit and the simple glass of bottled water into your life, human beings are suffering and being robbed of dignity.

“Rotten” streams on Netflix now.

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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