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A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food

Published on September 23, 2009

These days it seems like green is the new black. From designer grocery bags to eco-tourism, popular culture has finally embraced environmentalism and, for better or worse, begun coopting it with profit-driven campaigns. Regardless of how you feel about capitalism, the good news for mother earth is that changing your daily habits to lower your impact is no longer wholly dismissed as radical, hippy behavior, at least not by people in blue states. Core to this cultural paradigm shift is food. Americans are making the not-so-giant-leap in logic that what we eat affects our health and the health of our planet, and documentary films have played a significant role in getting us here.

In 1976 Americans were reeling from the Vietnam War and Watergate. The utopian visions of the sixties were fading memories and food was already firmly established in the collective psyche as a “product” – fast, cheap and out of control. It was in this context that filmmaker Frederick Wiseman released Meat cinema verité portrait of what was, at the time, one of the country’s largest slaughterhouses. Years before animal rights activists were capturing the disturbing conditions at factory farms with hidden camcorders, Wiseman invited Americans to meet their meat through his nuanced filmmaking.

Like Upton Sinclair’s groundbreaking 1906 novel The Jungle, which exposed the deplorable conditions in the urban meatpacking industry, Meat is as much about the massacred animals as it is about the commodification of the human animals who work in the factory. Wiseman shows us a dangerous killing floor manned largely by latinos and an upper management of exclusively white males – a pattern that continues to this day in America.

The mechanization of the food industry got another significant celluloid study in Ron Fricke’s 1992 Baraka, a feature-length montage of exquisitely filmed images exploring the human condition. For four-and-a-half minutes, shots of baby chickens moving through a factory and having their beaks seared off by workers are intercut with time-lapse sequences of people moving through the urban environment through subway cars, revolving doors and escalators. Void of narration, the scene is up for interpretation; on the one hand it seems to be making a statement about the hijacking of human experience by urban transit in which the individual is, like the chick, “processed” in an unending stream. On the other hand, one can’t help but think about the chick herself whose entire life and death is controlled and who could easily end up on the fast food tray of one of those thousands of people taking the train.

The fast food tray got a much closer look over a decade later in 2004 when Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me became one of the highest grossing docs in history. Spurlock’s experiment – eat nothing but McDonald’s for thirty days and see what happens – is documented in graphic detail as his health declines to the horror of his vegan girlfriend (who subsequently guides him through an all-veggie detox treatment).

Super Size Me

Super Size Me did for food what Bowling for Columbine (Dir. Michael Moore, 2002) did for school violence. Through a mixture of humor, spectacle, animation and investigatory journalism by a charismatic narrator/guide, the audience is sucked into an entertaining, if not contrived, narrative and can’t help but take home a few key concepts. In contrast to Meat and Baraka, there’s no question where Director Spurlock stands – fast food is making us fat and sick while corporations get rich.

The corporatization of our food system is a theme that has been revisited in great frequency in recent years in the documentary features The Future of Food (Dir. Deborah Koons, 2004), Our Daily Bread (Dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter, 2005), King Corn (Dir. Aaron Woolf, 2007), and the latest offering, Food, Inc. (Dir. Robert Kenner, 2009).

Food, Inc. is a meta film, taking on the many interconnected consequences of the industrialized food system, from the health impacts of ever ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup (1 out of 3 Americans born today are expected to develop early-onset diabetes), to water and air pollution caused by intensive factory farming, to human rights violations perpetrated against undocumented workers by mega corporations like Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer.

Perhaps the most shocking injustice revealed in Food, Inc. is the lengths that the food industry will go to silence their critics. “Veggie libel laws” have been passed in thirteen states that make it much easier for corporations to sue individuals who speak against them, giving them more protections than any other industry. These laws, coupled with a revolving door between corporate food offices and Washington, reveal the degree to which our own government is failing to protect its citizens from threats posed by mad cow disease, genetically-modified organisms and the other gambles big food companies are taking with our dinners.

One ingredient that is scarce in the theatrically released food documentaries discussed above is examples of positive alternatives. These films are primarily exposés of what has gone awry in our current system, with perhaps ten minutes at the conclusion featuring a montage of farmers’ markets and in invitation to change the system through consumer activism.

I’d love to see more films like No Impact Man, which opens in New York and Los Angeles on September 11th. Going beyond the arguments for why change is needed, the film documents what Colin Beavan and his family are doing to radically minimize their environmental footprint, including buying only locally grown, organic food.

One of the pleasures I had in curating the Media That Matters: Good Food collection for Arts Engine back in 2006 was finding films that showcase these alternatives, from Johanna Divine’s Young Agrarians about a new generation of farmers, to Martina Brimmer and Zora Tucker’s Food Justice: A Growing Movement which highlights the efforts of Oakland, California activists to reclaim their food through urban farming and grassroots distribution.

So here’s an invitation to all you filmmakers out there – we need more entertaining and inspiring documentaries about guerrilla gardening, community farms, composting, water catchment, seed-saving, and any strategy that puts nutritious food on our plates while enhancing the health of our planet.

Shira Golding is a filmmaker and community activist based in Ithaca, NY who strives to eat locally, sustainably and cruelty-free. Check out her work at www.shirari.com.

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You might like to know about our film - GOOD FOOD which premiered to great acclaim at the 2008 Seattle International Film Festival. GOOD FOOD which is about the resurgence of sustainable food and farming in the Pacific northwest could be seen as a sequel to all of the other food films. Where they are largely about so much that is wrong with the current food system, GOOD FOOD is about those who are doing it right. For an on-line preview, reviews, contacts to all the wonderful farmers in the film, go to http://www.goodfoodthemovie.org

Posted on 2009 09 24 by Mark Dworkin