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Health & Fitness

Plow to Plate Movie Series Presents: Food Fight

Our food system was co-opted. Fortunately an alternative emerged with the birth of a vital, local, sustainable food movement, which has brought back taste and variety to our tables.

 

Documentaries describing the current state of the industrial food system need an angle; otherwise they don’t draw you in. The Plow to Plate film series’ offering Fed Up! focused on genetically modified organisms; Chow Down delved into the ill health effects of the typical American diet; and King Corn, Black Gold, Bananas!* and others have held a magnifying glass up to a particular food.  Food Fight, a 2009 documentary by Chris Taylor, finds its center in the arch of history.

Taylor begins in the early part of the 20th century, particularly the Depression years, when people were literally starving because they could not afford to buy food. Not too long later, 400,000 World War II army recruits were rejected because of malnourishment. 

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Then, after the war, America could not effectively manage food supply and demand so farm policy consisted of paying farmers not to produce. This period, particularly the conformist 1950s, was also notable for the beginnings of an industrialized food system and its offshoots: microwaveable TV dinners, Miracle Whip, canned peas, frozen broccoli, and other conveniences that came at the expense of flavor. Whole generations grew up not experiencing the taste of a real tomato. 

In 1971, Earl Butz was appointed Secretary of Agriculture by Richard Nixon and initiated a 180 degree turn in farm policy. He created a system of subsidies and encouraged farmers to produce as much soy, corn, wheat, cotton, and other commodity crops as they could. However, these incentives did not apply to the production of fruits and vegetables that were classified as “specialty crops.”  Butz’s policies accelerated the industrialization of food systems into high gear by making these commodities profitable again. 

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The biggest winners however, more so than the farmers, were the middlemen, such as Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) that bought corn cheaply and turned it into corn syrup and other products that fill the middle sections of supermarkets. In short order, only a few generations, America went from a situation of hunger to one of chronic obesity and other health problems due to a diet of processed foods, high in calories and low in nutrition.

But that’s not the whole story. Countering these trends was a nascent, revolutionary food movement that had its beginnings in the Cultural Revolution centered in Berkeley, California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here Food Fight spends a great deal of time on Chez Panisse, Alice Water’s innovative and trend-setting restaurant that ushered in the locavore movement, concepts of sustainability, regional supply chains, and farmers’ markets that together created whole new economic systems apart from and opposed to the Industrial-Military-Food complex. 

Alice had not set out to do this.  She was simply an aesthete who appreciated the pleasure (that word is banded about a lot) of good food and hated the poor diets (predominantly coffee and donuts) of her hippy, radical friends so took it upon herself to “cater” the revolution.

The food revolution had its roots in the political and Cultural Revolution. And food, of course, remains intrinsically connected to politics to this day. More recently, Food Fight traces the lonely, and ultimately futile, efforts of democratic congressman Ron Kind of Wisconsin to reform the Farm Bill. Kind, even after being soundly defeated by entrenched interests, appears on camera, smiling, optimistic, undaunted, and ultimately willing to fight on.

Food Fight, lightly and somewhat humorously narrated by Taylor, is also profoundly upbeat. It finds hope in the exponential growth of farmers markets across the country, efforts in urban agriculture such as Will Allen’s Growing Power, Inc., which feeds and educates low income people in Milwaukee and Chicago, and the inexorable path of a movement launched by an innovative restaurateur, and her remarkable chef, Jeremiah Tower, in a small Californian restaurant more than 40 years ago.

Food Fight will be shown at the , 782 Union St. between 6th & 7th avenues, on Tuesday, August 14 at 7 p.m. The event is free and non-members are welcome.

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