By Adam Rabiner
Sometimes big things come in small packages. Food for Thought takes less time to watch than the average food shopping spree at the Coop. It’s sprawling, broad in scope, but fast-paced, over before you know it, propelled by excellent original music by Cloud Cult (sound a bit like Modest Mouse).
Touching most of the major topics of the Plow to Plate film series, there’s a historical run down of how we got to where we are now, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz warning farmers to “get big or get out.” Today 74% of the land on earth has been cleared for agriculture, sixty times more land than urban and suburban areas combined. Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet.
Food for Thought ably describes the status quo of commodity, monoculture agriculture which feeds 7 billion people (expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050). Reliant on inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, it consumes ten units of energy for every one unit of corn it produces.
Attention is paid to the present inflexion point, the need to rethink and reset. Modern agriculture, fine as long as we had cheap energy, inexpensive fertilizer, lots of surplus fresh water, a stable climate, is now becoming unsustainable. The Aral Sea has turned into a desert and the Colorado River doesn’t flow into the ocean any longer. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change, generating 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than the emissions from electricity generation, industry, or all the world’s planes, trains, and automobiles.
Food for Thought, in its wide ranging coverage, is many films in one. One section (resembling a mini Symphony of the Soil) makes the case that newly emerging forms of alternative, multi-crop and organic agriculture, use significantly less fertilizer, pesticides, energy, and water and produce more food than the older model. Another section on seed farms, regional ecologies, and microclimates quotes Henry David Thoreau, “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonder.” This reminded me of Seeds of Time and Open Sesame. Its discussion of fair wages echoes Food Chains; farm subsidies King Corn, food desserts, A Place at the Table. Similar footage of farmers markets are also found in many other films in this series. Dan Barber’s eloquent musings about lowly grains, lowly cuts of meat, and the importance of a chef’s craftsmanship in this ecosystem is familiar to anyone who’s watched the Netflix series Chefs Table.
The filmmakers are critics and questioners (a recent New York Times article, Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops, chronicles the deficiencies and false promises of GMOs). But they are not Luddites. This is not a polemic raging against technology. The film preaches a middle way exemplified by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture’s Farm Lab which partners with nature, combining evolution and appropriate technology with traditional knowledge, blending the best ideas of older and newer systems.
Food for Thought concludes by presenting some of these best new ideas, like the Green Bronx Machine, a vertical classroom farm (green walls) at Discovery High School. There is no silver bullet that alone will bring us safely to the future, just a smattering of experiments and ideas and strategies that collectively might be branded silver buckshot. Central to this approach is a spirit and culture of collaboration that brings all of these themes together in one place (as does the film).
The Park Slope Food Coop and the Safe Food Committee did this too with the 2009 and the 2012 Brooklyn Food Conferences, the first of which featured Dan Barber as a key note speaker. The message of this film and these conferences and this movement is clear. Regional agriculture is inevitable if we want to have a lighter footprint on this earth and we are willing and able to work together to achieve this future.
Sometimes big things come in small packages. Food for Thought takes less time to watch than the average food shopping spree at the Coop. It’s sprawling, broad in scope, but fast-paced, over before you know it, propelled by excellent original music by Cloud Cult (sound a bit like Modest Mouse).
Touching most of the major topics of the Plow to Plate film series, there’s a historical run down of how we got to where we are now, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz warning farmers to “get big or get out.” Today 74% of the land on earth has been cleared for agriculture, sixty times more land than urban and suburban areas combined. Irrigation is the biggest use of water on the planet.
Food for Thought ably describes the status quo of commodity, monoculture agriculture which feeds 7 billion people (expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050). Reliant on inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, it consumes ten units of energy for every one unit of corn it produces.
Attention is paid to the present inflexion point, the need to rethink and reset. Modern agriculture, fine as long as we had cheap energy, inexpensive fertilizer, lots of surplus fresh water, a stable climate, is now becoming unsustainable. The Aral Sea has turned into a desert and the Colorado River doesn’t flow into the ocean any longer. Agriculture is the biggest contributor to climate change, generating 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions, more than the emissions from electricity generation, industry, or all the world’s planes, trains, and automobiles.
Food for Thought, in its wide ranging coverage, is many films in one. One section (resembling a mini Symphony of the Soil) makes the case that newly emerging forms of alternative, multi-crop and organic agriculture, use significantly less fertilizer, pesticides, energy, and water and produce more food than the older model. Another section on seed farms, regional ecologies, and microclimates quotes Henry David Thoreau, “Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonder.” This reminded me of Seeds of Time and Open Sesame. Its discussion of fair wages echoes Food Chains; farm subsidies King Corn, food desserts, A Place at the Table. Similar footage of farmers markets are also found in many other films in this series. Dan Barber’s eloquent musings about lowly grains, lowly cuts of meat, and the importance of a chef’s craftsmanship in this ecosystem is familiar to anyone who’s watched the Netflix series Chefs Table.
The filmmakers are critics and questioners (a recent New York Times article, Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops, chronicles the deficiencies and false promises of GMOs). But they are not Luddites. This is not a polemic raging against technology. The film preaches a middle way exemplified by the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture’s Farm Lab which partners with nature, combining evolution and appropriate technology with traditional knowledge, blending the best ideas of older and newer systems.
Food for Thought concludes by presenting some of these best new ideas, like the Green Bronx Machine, a vertical classroom farm (green walls) at Discovery High School. There is no silver bullet that alone will bring us safely to the future, just a smattering of experiments and ideas and strategies that collectively might be branded silver buckshot. Central to this approach is a spirit and culture of collaboration that brings all of these themes together in one place (as does the film).
The Park Slope Food Coop and the Safe Food Committee did this too with the 2009 and the 2012 Brooklyn Food Conferences, the first of which featured Dan Barber as a key note speaker. The message of this film and these conferences and this movement is clear. Regional agriculture is inevitable if we want to have a lighter footprint on this earth and we are willing and able to work together to achieve this future.