Dropping bombs at film screenings.

Last night I went to a film screening for the documentary "Fresh," by Ana Sofia Jones, which was a critique of the industrial food system here in the United States and highlighted a number of players in the food system, whether they were vessels of change, business as usual, or somewhere in between.  The film featured the "eat local", sustainable food champions such as the charismatic hog farmer, Joel Salatin, who was made famous in The Omnivore's Dilemma; Michael Pollan himself; and Will Allen, activist, urban gardener, and founder of Growing Power, among others. It also spotlighted a number of farmers on the other side of the table--for example, a couple who raises chickens for a major poultry enterprise and a conventional farmer who sprays pesticides but draws the line at using GMO's. In the end, my take-away message was that the food movement is on the rise and is taking root in different communities in many different forms, but that at the end of the day, it's up to you as the individual to decide how to be a part of this movement.  I was also left feeling unfulfilled.

I hadn't really learned anything new (but, then again, I'm also as choir member-y as you get, so I didn't hold that against the film), but I also experienced the familiar tired, deflated feeling I sometimes get whenever I think about food and social justice (which is often, unfortunately). I looked around the theater and I think every single audience member was white. And if everyone wasn't, the rate was at about 99%. And with regard to the film, it celebrated many food justice advocates, for sure, but once again, very white--in fact, only one interviewee (Allen) was of color, and I was disappointed. The food movement's biggest challenge is overcoming the fact that it's been labeled as elitist and white, and given the fact that this film was coming out a bit later in the game (compared to Fast Food Nation and Food, Inc., for example, which both came out a few years ago), I expected it to represent more than the usual (white) suspects.

I guess I was sort of primed by this article I had read a few weeks ago by Janani Balasubramanian, titled: Sustainable Food and Privilege: Why is Green Always White (and Male and Upper Class). Read it here:  http://www.racialicious.com/2010/05/20/sustainable-food-and-privilege-why-is-green-always-white-and-male-and-upper-class/

Balasubramanian touches upon a lot of controversial but necessary themes within the food movement, namely, that it's still perceived to be a white, upper middle class male-dominated field. I don't agree with with everything she says, however. She argues the the movement is largely a white male-led movement, and that conversations about race and gender have been skirted or lost; I argue that there is plenty being done around these issues, but that the food movement has a serious identity problem. It's perceived as such because the great work that's being led by people and communities of color is not getting the attention that it merits.

However, this doesn't solve the problem. The image issue still exists, and as long as food that's grown without pesticides or hormones is seen as boutique and gourmet (due largely to its higher price tag), we aren't going to get very far. The food movement is so fascinating and important to me because it's so universal--we all need to eat, and we all deserve to eat well. So far, though, we've got only a segment of the movement getting the big-time press, while we're seeing diet-related diseases and lack of access to fresh, healthy food that are unequally distributed among black and latino communities in the United States. Going to back to Fresh the movie, I was left in my seat feeling like the movement was making headway, but not in the cross-cultural, inclusive way that true social movements take.

Luckily for us, Jones was present at the end of the screening, and opened up the floor for a question-and-answer session.  I squirmed in my seat, wondering if I should bring up this complex issue, whether or not it was the appropriate venue, and decided to go for it. I didn't intend to pose the issue in question form, since there really isn't an answer; rather, I talked about how the movie highlighted some really important issues, but that it featured mostly white activists. I asked her to look around and I commented on the fact that all of us in the theater did not respresent the ethnic makeup of the city of Boston, and I asked her what her thoughts were on food access and white privilege.

Woof. After writing it all down here, I realize that I kind of did drop a big bomb there, and might have come off as a dedicated night-ruiner for this poor woman. I assure you that this wasn't the case--I really just felt like someone needed to talk about access, and about the image of the food movement, and wondered if she had thought about it.

The rest of the session essentially turned into a two-person dialogue between Jones and me, despite the many other audience members. She had handled the other questions with eloquence and grace, yet after my comment, she stumbled over her words, and it appeared that I had gotten to her emotional core. Apparently she had been thinking about this issue, and it made her just as uncomfortable as it had made me. She spoke in circles for a couple of minutes until she got her grounding. Her answer wasn't really an answer at all (but my question wasn't really a question, either). She talked a lot about the need for a cultural shift, for the need for the individual to prioritize food over material goods like cable television and electronics. I agreed with her, and yet I didn't. How do you prioritize food when you don't come from a privileged standpoint? How do you prioritize food when you don't have the luxury of time to stop what you're doing, think about the food system, visit the farmers market, and prepare a gorgeous, healthy meal? I agree that we, as Americans, are used to our food being cheap, and that part of this movement is about education and shifting of priorities, but how do we create this cultural shift she's talking about when we don't all start out at the same place?

What I do know is that we need to keep having these conversations, and we need to recognize all of the many players in this movement. Eating well is connected to health, to ecology, to the preservation of cultural traditions, to the creation of community, to our individual rights to choose what we put in our bodies.

I'm brought back to my memories of the farm in Argentina, when the fields were constantly plagued with chipica, the most annoying grass-like weed that grows underground in a tangled, thick mess of grassroots knots and is impossible to eliminate from the field because everytime you rip it out, you always end up leaving a piece of its root, which is connected to ten million other roots. I understood the term "grassroots movement," fittingly, while I was down there. You build a successful movement, you create networks and connect yourself to other networks until the movement can't be quelled by any one superpower, no matter how hard it tries. This is our future--we just need to keep talking. Keep fighting.

Keep asking the hard questions.