Food Fight: Filming the Food Revolution

“I’ve always been a fan of good food, and I love to eat,” director Chris Taylor told Organic Connections concerning his motivation for making the film. “I was reading about a food movement called the California Food Revolution, which basically concerns a style of cooking that celebrates ingredients and has the fewest manipulations between farm and plate. It’s really nothing new in the sense that it’s Mediterranean cuisine, but in the fifties and sixties it was certainly something new to America. The reason I concentrated on that in the movie is because what began as a search for taste and great-tasting produce actually has now turned into a political movement. That is the interesting thing for me; it’s the switch from hedonism to politically progressive activism. That’s the story of the California food movement, which we now call local, seasonal, sustainable food.”

Why a Revolution?

One doesn’t have to look far to discover why such a revolution was needed in the first place. It’s the story of how a mega industry came about based on inexpensive low-quality food, and why it’s still with us.

The film takes us back to the end of World War II. During the war, numerous technologies such as flash freezing and dehydration had been evolved in an attempt to bring nutrition to millions of soldiers fighting in regions where the provision of fresh food was impossible. When the war was over, companies that had invested substantial monies into the research and development of these technologies were looking for ways to continue utilizing them.

The results of this quest gave us TV dinners and an endless variety of processed foods, all marketed for our convenience. Cooking was promoted as “drudgery” instead of the creative, healthy activity it is. The new packaged dinners and ready-to-eat meals were sold (by cigarette-smoking, martini-drinking ad men of the fifties) with slogans aimed at middle-class moms: “It’s like having a maid.”

At the same time, Food Fight shows that another whole industry had evolved during the war for the manufacture of nitrates, used in making bombs. When aggressions ceased, methods were sought to continue this profitable venture and they were found in, of all places, farming. “Basically we had built up this huge wartime capacity to make explosives and all the other things we needed for war,” Taylor explained. “That same kind of chemistry used in bombs and explosives was what was needed to make fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. So we had a huge industrial capacity to make these after World War II, and that’s exactly how our agricultural sector evolved, to take advantage of this capability.”

These chemicals made it possible for farmers to grow unheard-of numbers of crops, as nitrates promote very fast crop growth. Suddenly food companies were faced with the problem of how to sell all this food. The marketing people found the methods in snack food, junk food and a whole host of high-carbohydrate, non-nutritious comestibles.

Modern supermarkets are designed so that the shopper must navigate through the packaged high-carb snack foods, sodas and the like in order to make it to the proteins, fruits and vegetables. Food Fight also points out that the spending per capita for food is way down, while our spending on healthcare is way up. Coincidence?

The Revolution

With the twang of psychedelic guitars, Food Fight begins the exploration of the real-food revolution with footage of the college anti-war demonstrations of the sixties and a beautiful young bohemian-attired woman named Alice Waters cooking for and serving the demonstrators.

“This movement really started in Berkeley,” said Taylor. “It was Alice Waters and her restaurant, Chez Panisse.”

For Alice Waters, it was essentially a matter of getting back to the land and serving real taste. As part of the “revolution” taking place, people were starting farms and growing their own food, rebelling against the companies that were providing chemical weapons such as Agent Orange for the Vietnam War and simultaneously supplying fertilizers and pesticides for our food production.

Alice Waters took her love of cooking from the protest lines to an idea for a new restaurant, a place that would embody her values of real food shared at the table as a celebration. The film contains vintage footage of patrons dancing and singing, and sharing in some incredible meals.

Word of Chez Panisse spread far and wide, and chefs who in the future would be creating their own well-deserved reputations apprenticed there. Mark Peel, executive chef at the famous Campanile restaurant in Los Angeles, was a pastry apprentice at Chez Panisse from 1980 to 1981. Paul Bertolli, renowned author and for many years executive chef of the esteemed Oliveto restaurant in Oakland, California, was a chef at Chez Panisse from 1982 to 1992. Suzanne Goin, chef and restaurateur for four of Los Angeles’ best restaurants—Lucques, Tavern, A.O.C. and The Hungry Cat—was a Chez Panisse line cook from 1990 to 1992. Dan Barber, now the owner and head chef of the famed Blue Hill restaurants in New York State, apprenticed there in 1993.

Wolfgang Puck

As Chez Panisse was ruling from the north, another future luminary in the culinary world, a young, talented Austrian by the name of Wolfgang Puck, was creating a reputation for himself in the south—specifically at his new restaurant, called Spago, on the Sunset Strip.

Like Waters, Puck went in search of great ingredients and couldn’t find them in conventional places. And, like Waters, he finally found them at a farmers’ market—in this case, the weekly market in Santa Monica, from which nearly all of L.A.’s great chefs now obtain many of their finest items.

A primary difference between Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck was that Puck was serving patrons right smack in the middle of Hollywood. These were the sort of patrons that were followed everywhere by cameras, and it wasn’t long before Puck’s cooking became nationwide news as a result.

Thanks to the media, cookbooks and word of mouth, the revolution in locally and sustainably grown food spread all across the country and has now extended throughout the world. Financed by consistent orders and cash flow from high-end restaurants, many farmers have been able to diversify their produce and create a synergy with chefs for ever better and more exotic ingredients. The ultimate winner has been the food consumer who shops at the farmers’ markets and is able to purchase this great-tasting locally grown produce.

For Everyone

One complaint that could be levied against this movement, however, is that most average citizens cannot afford this food and certainly cannot afford regular meals at places like Chez Panisse and Spago. How, then, can we get real sustainable food into the mainstream?

Food Fight provides several answers—and shows us true pioneering work in this regard.

Growing Power

Will Allen is a man whom Chris Taylor calls “a real American hero.” As founder of an organization named Growing Power, Allen began his story with teens from inner-city neighborhoods who needed a place to work and himself as a farmer with some land. In 1993, he designed a program that offered teens an opportunity to work at his store and renovate greenhouses to grow food for their community. What started as a simple partnership to change the landscape of the north side of Milwaukee has now received worldwide media attention and has imparted the message “It can be done.”

Today Growing Power serves as a living museum and idea factory for the young, the elderly, farmers, producers and other professionals ranging from USDA personnel to urban planners. Training includes every aspect of growing and producing sustainable crops, all the way from soil and crop management up to and including project management.

Extending outward from its Milwaukee origins, Growing Power has expanded to numerous localities including Chicago, where can be found a large urban farm run by Will Allen’s daughter, Erika.

Food Fight profiles the way in which Growing Power is located in what Allen calls a “food desert,” a part of the city devoid of traditional grocery stores (let alone organic ones) but lined with fast-food, liquor and convenience stores selling mostly soda and highly processed food items.

“Will Allen is really a unique individual,” said Taylor. “He is not only a pioneer of the kind of farming that could help change our cities back into secure habitable environments, but he is also exporting knowledge, wisdom and technology that he’s developed all across America and all across the world. So Will and Erika Allen are really American heroes. Will is literally breaking new ground and encouraging others to replicate his model. You can’t calculate how strong a contribution that is.”

Will Allen’s work is now being widely recognized. In November 2008, he was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award—a $500,000 no-strings grant. In January he was consulted by Barack Obama’s transition team and invited to participate in a conference call with Obama advisers gathering food policy information for the new administration’s Department of Agriculture. In May of this year, he received a $400,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation.

Alice Waters

Food Fight also profiles what may be our greatest hope for answering in a meaningful way the billions of advertising dollars directed at our children from the processed-food industry and fast-food chains: Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program. This program—which has already been proven in several public schools across the country—aims to educate children from the beginning about raising and cooking sustainable, healthy food. Crops are grown right on the school grounds by the students themselves and cooked in the schools’ kitchens.

“One has to admit that you can find Alice Waters at just about every turn of the path on the journey to widely produced healthy, sustainable food,” Taylor remarked. “She has been a very successful leader in harnessing the various energies and political power and money needed to run a pilot program like Edible Schoolyard. In the nineties, when it began, there was really nothing like this going on and nobody could figure out what it was going to be. She managed to pull together the very disparate community bodies—public and private corporations alike—to make the Edible Schoolyard project work. It’s a phenomenal project. Students are learning firsthand about well-grown organic, healthy food.

“Something that is really important here is the lack of food information that we have in our society; nobody is telling or teaching our kids about food except these food programs. And the result is the only information we get as a culture about food is coming from commercials. It’s coming from McDonald’s. It’s coming from Swanson. It’s coming from everybody who has a vested interest in making money and not making healthy food. So obviously the Edible Schoolyard programs are really becoming popular across the country, and are a huge important force in relearning the agricultural wisdom that we seem to have thrown out in the last two generations. If you throw that out, it’s forgotten, and that’s a very sad thing for our culture.”

So, yes, it’s important that you see this documentary and show it to all your friends. But it’s also an opportunity to forward this highly beneficial revolution. Visit the Food Fight website at www.foodfightthedoc.com (section “Vote with Your Fork”) for some good resources.

Food Fight is also now available on DVD at www.foodfightthedoc.com.