Last week, a few friends and I got together to watch “Food Inc.,” the 2008 documentary which, according to its website, exposes “the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.”

(In a humorous aside, the guy who brought everyone together to watch the film called our group ”GOLFEN,” an acronym meaning: green, organic, local, fresh, eco-friendly night.)

I went into the movie expecting a fairly liberal piece railing against so-called “capitalist pigs” and their support of big business and how evil George Bush is. And there certainly was an element of that in the film””this was inevitable, considering the subject matter is one that is championed by many liberals.

But it also included a lot of smart commentary on how agri-business works.

The most interesting parts of the film were its sections on farm subsidies and “factory farming.”

Farm subsidies, started by FDR in the 1930s as a temporary measure to help the farm industry during the Great Depression, reduce the cost of food by legislative fiat, making that food cheaper for the consumer while putting money in farmers’ pockets.

The problem is that when a product is subsidized, there is too much of it. Take for example, corn, perhaps the most heavily subsidized food on the market. Corn and corn-based substances are in just about every food that we eat, which is why many of our most unhealthy foods are cheaper than healthier products.

So-called “factory farming” involves the mistreatment of animals in order to make mass quantities of food. As one “Food Inc.” interviewee rhetorically asked, “If you can grow a chicken in 49 days, why would you want one you gotta grow in three months?”

But when animals are crowded into the same area, forced to eat food that they aren’t naturally disposed to eat in order to be made artificially larger, it isn’t as good for us when we eat them. We get sick. We get obese. We become less healthy.

These are legitimate problems that don’t require you to be a bleeding-heart liberal to understand.

In fact, the movie and its ideas have had an audience with right-wingers in America. Julie Gunlock, reviewing the movie in “National Review,” mainstream conservatism’s favorite magazine, wrote, “To my surprise, I actually liked most of it.” John Schwenkler, writing in “The American Conservative, said that advocating buying local food is “a conservative cause if ever there was one.” Writer Rod Dreher has even written a book titled “Crunchy Cons,” the cause célèbre of which was buying locally-grown organic food.

What all of this means is that the issues raised by “Food Inc.” are not the sole property of radical leftists; conservatives can advocate them too.

The Right and the Left can come together and advocate for the ending farm subsidies, which, according to a report by the Heritage Foundation, have caused the real price of fruits and vegetables to rise by 40 percent while the price of soft drinks have decreased by 23 percent; they can show support for those who want to buy locally and organically while ending our cultural dependency on fast food; they can advocate the proper treatment of the animals so that when we eat we don’t get sick.

Let’s all get out our clubs””it’s time to go “golfen.”