“The Smell of Money” is a social justice documentary about environmental racism and its role in bringing home the bacon, ham and sausage in the American food chain.

Set in the towns and rural counties of Eastern N.C. where Big Pork has set up shop, with giant processing plants fed by “factory farms” and their underregulated/unenforced cesspools of pig feces. “Money” takes us through the decades-long legal fight to do something about a toxic, life-shortening and occasionally directly lethal stench. That stink is produced by these absentee landlord factory farms plopped down, often on land obtained by dubious manipulations of small town courthouses and old deeds, right in the middle of people’s neighborhoods and lives.

It’s a broad subject, so much so that parts of the story — the infamous Southern practice of disputing poor Black landholder’s century-old deeds and claims to inherited property by white interests with deep pockets — have to be mentioned but passed-over to make room for other grievances. Specifically, the way Smithfield Foods in its many incarnations has bent the state’s politics to its will, devaluing working class folks and limited-incoming retirees’ property, taking shortcuts to solve a catastropic waste problem and cavalierly “waiting out” the parade of lawsuits and gigantic judgments rendered against Smithfield, hoping the elderly and made-sick-by-Smithfield-practices plaintiffs will die.

Director Shawn Bannon and screenwriter Jamie Berger’s film is infuriating. And you don’t have to have driven through this corner of the South, as I used to on a regular basis, to be mad at a corporate invasion targeted at “invisible” and mostly Black and generally powerless people.

The entire enterprise is engineered to protect the company behind all the wrongdoing as it signs up farmers and those who get their hands on farmland to open feeder factories — CAFO, “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” — directs how such operations should be run and funds politicians who change laws to protect them from demands to do something about the dangerous smell and insulate them from accountability.

Even the way the debate is framed has been manipulated, as a parade of state TV news coverage demonstrates. The fumes are diminished with the word “nuisance,” and the white-haired Jesse Helms wannabe anchor at WRAL-TV seems to relish the confusion the word sews as he describes “nuisance” suits in ways that make it sound like the “nuisance” is to this multi-billion dollar, now Chinese-owned corporation.

One of the film’s villains is the Republican state ag commissioner, Steve Troxler, who rallies farmers — who aren’t being sued despite their role in spraying waste over acreage guaranteed to seep into the water supply and very air breathed by their “neighbors.”

“We are NOT a nuisance,” Troxler bellows at rallies. “We have done nothing WRONG. We are feeding the WORLD. What we are is a BLESSING.”

But as plaintiffs such as Elsie Herring, living in a literal “Little Pink House,” Rene Miller and others make clear, the only people “blessed” live a long ways at a geographical and financial remove from this nasty business which occasionally kills an employee thanks to the toxic environment they’re working in.

Another villain in the film is Republican U.S. Senator Thom Tillis, praising industry and holding meetings with corporate interests, but doing ignoring his alleged constituents. Smithfield refused to respond to interview requests. A fourth villain is unseen, as we hear of Duplin County sheriff’s department harassment of plaintfiffs, and we see video of then-sheriff (he’s been voted out, hopefully for the right reasons) Blake Wallace’s deputies following and intimidating the film crew.

Wallace, as one plaintiff notes, looking across the way at the foul factory now right across the road from her, owns one of those very CAPO plants. His conflict of interest is so obvious that the film doesn’t even get into how he acquired that land, far from where he himself lives.

Activists such as Naeema Muhammad, lawyers like Lisa Wallace and farmers Don and Susan Webb, who gave up their CAPO operation when they saw what it was doing to their neighbors, make the case that the last thing the state should be doing is siding with a gigantic corporation against locals, no matter how many “jobs” they insist it delivers.

“A good American won’t intentionally stink up another man’s home,” is the folksy Don Webb‘s simple statement of fact.

But like others seen in the film, he was old when interviewed and has died since the documentary was completed.

And even though juries have found Smithfield liable and put it on the hook for hundreds of millions, payouts have been deathly slow in coming. A compliant Republican N.C. legislature has allowed Big Pork to change laws to make it harder to sue over having what more than one interview subject — scientists and academic public health experts included — refers to as “s–t” dumped and sprayed into their yard, their homes and their lives.

In America these days, the injustice goes on even when the facts seem obvious, even when the fight seems won.

Rating: unrated, disturbing images, profanity

Cast: Elsie Herring, Senator Thom Tillis, Naeema Muhammad, Steve Troxler, Don Webb, Susan Webb, others

Credits: Directed by Shawn Bannon, scripted by Jamie Berger. An Unreasonble release.

Running time: 1:24