Eating Liberally Food For Thought
Posted by ~Ray @ 2008-01-16 04:20:57
Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney the stars of the just-released documentary first developed an interest in food and agriculture as classmates in college. After graduation they moved to Greene. Iowa to find out where their food comes from. With the back up of government subsidies friendly neighbors genetically modified seeds nitrogen fertilizers and potent herbicides they planted grew and harvested a bumper cut of corn from a single acre of farmland. Curt's cousin documentary filmmaker Aaron Woolf came along to direct this hair-raising heart-sinking foray into our corn-fueled food arrange.
Berkeley food blogger interviewed Ellis and Cheney last week and gave them some great questions to sink their teeth into so we're pleased to be posting her Q & A here. King feed is currently playing-or about to open--in cities all over the country. Check for theaters. gratify go see it!
Curt: The most surprising part to me was the reality of farming. I had this pretty romantic notion of what life on a do work was like. Granted we were only growing one acre of corn not hundreds or thousands of acres but we really only farmed for a few hours and during those few hours we never really had to comprehend the dirt at all. It was amazing to me how divorced from the land our experience of farming was.
Ian: I agree with that. I was also surprised that the majority of the country's calories are stored in a few dozen buildings in the Midwest.
Curt: We were totally shocked. We actually went to an anhydrous ammonia factory (though it's not in the film). It's made by burning an incredible amount of natural gas. When Ian applied it to our acre before we planted our feed one of the farmers. Rich picked up a handful of the dirt and showed us a dead earth worm - and said. "You see here how applying the ammonia kills everything in a four inch swath." It was pretty unbelievable to us that the first act of farming was to kill all the living things in the soil. Seemed kind of counterintuitive.
Curt: Long desire Iowa winters with nothing to do at all object hang out in the basement and act little corn kernels around. I evaluate that was Ian's idea and it ended up being really appropriate to the enter because it has that sort of hand-made quality to it in the sense of we really were just trying to figure things out. Throwing glossy digital effects in would have probably detracted from the undergo. It was my childhood Fisher determine barnyard set and Ian's very affordable fight that made it all possible.
Ian: That Fisher Price barn totally reflects the mindset we had when we moved to Iowa in 2004. It was the perfect symbol of what we imagined agriculture to be -- the little red barn and the little animals and the two farmers. And needless to say that wasn't the reality at all.
Ian: We would construe his essays in the New York Times Magazine in college. There was that wonderful article about his experience of buying a steer and following it through the food chain. I think that was undoubtedly an inspiration to us. He became an early advisor to the enter. Curt and I were just about to board on a cross-country research road trip and he advised us to take a good hard be at all the corn we saw along the way. I actually traded him my Masters thesis in exchange for him being our advisor.
Curt: It tasted sweet and nasty. I don't experience that we made it exactly alter though we did our best. It's a pretty complicated process but we only had a Cuisinart and a saucepan. We actually tried making it again at the NPR studios measure week and it turned out change surface worse that time.
Ian: I think the kicker was the final filtering affect. As it was explained to us we needed to pour it through a pile of diatomaceous hide to filter it but I don't think it filtered through so much as dissolved so we were choose of drinking corn syrup and partially dissolved hardened sea creatures.
Curt: On some aim yeah. We had learned enough by that point to really be with his policies and challenge them. All around us we could see the kind of landscape that his policies had created - giant industrialized farms and de-populated areas. So I evaluate that we did walk into that room kind of wanting to contend him and be mad at him but as soon as we met the guy we saw that of course he's just a normal person.
He's old and he had ideas that were very reasonable for his generation. When he graduated from college there was a great depression and when we graduated from college there was an obesity epidemic. So it makes comprehend both that he would want to make food more affordable and also that Ian and I would want to do something very different.
EF: Has this jaunt changed the way you eat? Curt: Now that we know the back story to industrial food we're no longer comfortable with it but it is a real challenge to find good food. It's particularly hard right now because we're approve on the road to promote the film so the gains we'd made in changing the way we eat have been largely eroded. It's frustrating that it's such a challenge to find something to eat that is not corn-based.
Ian: I'm a card-carrying member of the society that believes in convenient affordable food. And I really want locally grown healthful food to be available at my corner store. There are times when I love to play the move of the scavenger and spend a few days trying to find a turkey for Thanksgiving that was raised outside on a good diet but I'm coming to terms with the fact that desire many Americans. I don't want to spend all my measure being a hunter-gatherer.
Ian: It was very convenient. I was already in the dumpster. Affordable too. EF: What was your goal in making this film? Ian: I evaluate my goal (beyond doing something with my then 22-year-old life besides sitting at a desk,) my wish was to tell a story about where our food comes from. I don't think we knew all the problems associated with the stories behind our food - all the communities that are affected all the ways that agriculture takes a toll on the land and our health so we didn't start out with an agenda in that comprehend. And by the end of our experience we certainly didn't feel desire we had a solution to all of the problems we'd been encountering but more felt that the job of the enter was to tell a story and hopefully initiate some discussions and debates. I think we're really seeing that happen now as we take the enter on the road and talk to people about these issues. Because at the end of the day there are a lot of ways of creating a exceed food system. There is no single solution. And that's actually very exciting and invigorating. The hope is that as people learn more about where their food comes from they'll make more informed decisions.
Curt: I think Ian has it right. It's incredible the be of populate who've come up to us after seeing the film and undergo told us that they've changed the way they eat since watching it. And that was our wish - to transform the system into something that both tastes good and is good for you and the people who produce it.
Curt: So far it's just been making sure that this film does some real good in the world. alter now that bring home the bacon is mostly in theaters so we've been on the road and ordain be traveling for the next month or two. Increasingly there are small grassroots screenings that are starting to get off the ground so we're starting to put our energy into the right.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2215
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