Sundance 2023: ‘Food and Country’ Directed by Laura Gabbert
Premieres Section
During the lockdown time of COVID, trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl started to make a documentary to show COVID and the shutdown’s effect on the food system, from farmers to restaurants. But her worries over the fate of small farmers, ranchers, and chefs as they wrestled with both immediate and systemic challenges also exposed the broken food system as political and social, and ended with her forging true relationships on a personal level with the originators, suppliers and consumers in the food chain.
Starting in March 2020 Reichl reached out to those who were innovativing new ways of structuring their businesses. She speaks with Brandon Jew, a San Francisco restauranteer in Chinatown, who notes that people are scared to go to Chinatown because COVID has been politicized as Chinese. Reem Assil, a young Arab woman with a restaurant in Oakland, makes her staff co-owners as a way to share and get through this time. Reichl’s contemporary and close friend in the Bay Area, Alice Waters, the first to use local homegrown produce in her restaurant Chez Panisse discusses how much better it is to deal directly with the farmers rather than middlemen.
She speaks to farmer Bob Jones Jr. of the White Oak Pastures, fourth generation farmer who in the mid 90s gradually moved away from his father’s industrialized farming techniques as it produced waste and did not consider the welfare of its animals who need to express their instinctive behaviors. Over 20 years he changed the soil from a dead mineral medium to a live, organic medium teaming with life. Supplying the food conscious restaurant innovators directly also mandated starting his own meat processing. “Everything is tied to everything else,” he states.
Rancher Steve Stratford discusses the cattle business as a US and international problem and points out there are only four big meat packers, so large that if two don’t operate because of a problem like swine fever, the nation suffers and lots of livestock goes unused. “It is all about how cheaply you can produce and it results in waste that could feed a small country. Other countries do not have the discretionary income of American because they spend on food.” Amercans buy food cheaply, but it is problematic (and inferior) because it is mass produced
Meat producers and consumers must rely on these four meat packing companies. JBS is 100% Brazilian owned, National Beef is 51% Brazilian and Tyson and Cargill are in the hands of two giant American corporations. The Department of Justice Anti Trust Regulatory should take action and the government should encourage smaller meat plants every 3 to 400 miles supplying 2–3% of the daily slaughter and the meat producers should own the plants. Now, should one of the four go down, 15% of the food supply is impacted.
Since the time of this writing, the N.Y. Times has published an expose on meat packers and food processing plants in general which villainize them even more! Their knowing use of illegal immigrant child labor is chilling and will make readers of this and viewers of the film even more passionate about eating well and avoiding the evil of unhealthy processed and mass produced food. See FoodProcessing.com reflect the N.Y. Times article on Feb. 26's exhaustive investigation that went far beyond the early-February fine against Packers Sanitation Services Inc., which provides mostly nighttime/ third-shift sanitation services to many food & beverage plants. That investigation by the U.S. Dept. of Labor found at least 102 children 13 to 17 years old working for the contract sanitation company in 13 meat-processing facilities in eight states. The list specified underage immigrant workers at JBS USA's Grand Island, Neb., plant, Cargill plant in Dodge City, Kan., a JBS facility in Worthington, Minn., Buckhead Meat, George's Inc., Gibbon Packing, Greater Omaha Packing, Maple Leaf Farms, Turkey Valley Farms and Tyson. At least three of the minors reportedly suffered injuries while on the job with PSSI. Read the NY Times expose and weep. You will surely become more conscious of the issues raised in this documentary which never mention the abuse of child labor. Farmers (and ranchers) must take out huge bank loans every year at the beginning of planting, hope for good crops to pay off the loan and in the end, make very little profit whereas the suppliers and food processing firms make millions as they supply supermarkets and chain restaurants. America’s largest corporate restaurant food supplier Sysco has 32 states to supply and is supported by USDA. Even during COVID, USDA bailed them out and shut out the smaller suppliers who then must abide by Sysco’s system which in 2021 made $51 billion in sales.
In the early 1900s there were more Black farmers than White. In the 1920s 19% of farms were Black owned. Today it is 1%. Food Apartheid is explored in the course of Ruth’s discussions. Of the 57,000 farms in NY State, ony 139 are Black. 96% of the land owners of farms are white; government interventions help Whites, not Blacks, with subsidies. This makes the food system structurally racist.
As part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the minimum wage was established. But black workers, who had been hired as food service workers immediately after slavery, were not included. They were not paid wages at all. They were expected to live off of tips. Tips had just been introduced to the US from Europe. The Blacks, along with immigrants, other racial minorities, women, and the disabled were not included in Roosevelt’s New Deal minimum wages and in fact, only 80 years later did legistration finally grant them a miunum wage of $2.13 per hour. The lowest paid employee is the restaurant worker; next are the farmworkers.
This principal of cheap abundant food started after World War II hand in glove with the arms race when the huge stockpile of ammunition was turned into fertilizer and the government encouraged farms to replace animals with machines thus creating the factory model of food production along with a great debt taken on by the farmers. It was seen as a way to fight Communism to have the cheapest most abundant food on earth. The nutritive value of American food from 1940 to 2000 fell to 40%.
When President Nixon and Khrushchev held the “Kitchen Debates” a point of pride was fast food. The industrialization of food and food processing, and the rise of chain restaurant limited the number of processors and wholesalers to be used by farmers and ranchers. This drove farmers to marginal living as the middlemen’s high costs took most of the farmers’ and cattlemen’s profits.
As you can see, I learned a great deal from this film and found it fascinating as future viewers will as well. America’s decades-old policy of producing cheap food at all costs hobbles farmers and ranchers who are striving to stay independent. Ruth Reichl, a fascinating woman in her own right, coming of age on a commune founded by her then husband in Berkeley in the 60s and writing little vignettes about food for marginal publications, she became a renowned food writer for the New York and Los Angeles Times. As Reichl witnesses and follows intrepid characters puzzling through intractable circumstances, she takes stock of the path she hersef has traveled and the ideals she left behind. Through her eyes, we learn to understand the humanity and struggle behind the food we eat.
Food is elemental; without it we die, but with it, we can either become healthier or ill, depending upon its provenance and processing. Cheaper is not better. Food and Country, along Sundance’s other film Against the Tide, and the 2018 Telluride/ Toronto premiering film The Biggest Little Farmshould be seen in economic classes, culinary arts schools and ecological studies.
Filmmaker Laura Gabbert (City of Gold, 2015 Sundance Film Festival) with Reichl gives the expansive history behind an ever-more consolidating food industry. The film covers a rich cultural spectrum, from fine dining rooms to farmlands, discovering passionate, inspirational changemakers along the way. Laura Gabbert’s City of Gold (Sundance, SXSW 2015), was released theatrically in 50+ markets by IFC and included in Vogue magazine’s “78 best documentaries of all time.” Gabbert also directed the feature documentaries Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles (Tribeca 2020, IFC/Hulu), No Impact Man (Sundance 2009, Oscilloscope), and Sunset Story (Tribeca 2005, Independent Lens).
Producer Caroline Libresco was a programmer for Sundance for twenty years before leaving to produce. She is known for Disclosure (2020), American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs (2013) and Sunset Story (2003).
Producer Paula P. Manzanedo is known for Memory, Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) and Dive (2022).
Directed and Produced By: Laura Gabbert (City of Gold)
Produced By: Ruth Reichl, Paula P. Manzanedo, Caroline Libresco
Executive Produced By: Jamie Wolf, Nathalie Seaver, Sigrid Dyekjær, Melony Lewis, Adam Lewis, Jana Edelbaum, Rachel Cohen, Janet Tittiger, Peter Tittiger, Jenn Lee Smith, Andrea van BeurenJessica Lacy and Oliver Wheeler of Range Media Partners, a subsidary of Anton Films is representing the film which to date seems to have no U.S. or international distribution set.
99 minutes
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