When documentary filmmaker ana Sofia joanes set out to make the film Fresh, her motivation wasn’t one of creating an exposé of the horrors of the industrial food system—although touching on such issues could hardly be avoided; it was more a message of hope. “I feel that we’re getting so much negative information and the problems that we’re facing—the food crisis, the oil crisis, the water crisis, war, famine and others—are so complicated and appear to be outside the reach of our individual actions,” ana told Organic Connections. “So I wanted to figure out how I could go beyond this feeling of powerlessness, and meaninglessness of individual action, to recapture a sense that all of us together are creating our reality. We need to do something about the problems that we’re facing.”
And so she has. Fresh leaves the viewer quite uplifted with the message that, yes, something can be done about it, that there are many who are indeed taking effective actions—and, most importantly, you can too.
Confronting the Issues
For the film to truly convey hope, the problems needing solving had to be addressed, which they were by experts such as Michael Pollan. The essential message is this: Industrial agriculture goes completely against nature in the hope of producing higher quantities of food more cheaply—and we are paying the price dearly in terms of increasing amounts of pesticides and animal drugs, cruelty, pollution, poor consumer health, and serious harm to our ecosystems.
A couple of amazing stories are used in the movie to illustrate the point. One is of a Missouri natural hog farmer by the name of Russ Kremer.
Kremer was not always natural, and in fact had gone to college to study agriculture so that he would be better able to run the family farm. The thrust of his education was to gain the most pork out of the least amount of feed. He returned to the farm and implemented the methods he had learned, thinking to maximize profits.
Within a couple of years, he was experiencing a high number of diseases in his herd. He would spend half his days just injecting pigs for various illnesses, such as respiratory diseases and diarrhea.
The light began to dawn on Kremer when he was stabbed in the leg by the tusk of a boar. Two weeks later his leg swelled up to one and a half times its size and was throbbing with pain. His doctor told him he had contracted a mutated form of strep—one for which four different antibiotics did nothing at all. He didn’t have much faith that he’d actually survive, and probably wouldn’t have had it not been for a new-generation drug given him in the hospital.
When Kremer returned to the farm, he realized that he was feeding his pigs antibiotics to speed growth rates and ward off low-grade infections; but what was actually occurring was that while weak strains of diseases such as E. coli and strep were being killed off, stronger strains were surviving, mutating and becoming more powerful.
When he recognized what he was doing by selling hogs to neighbors for breeding and selling pork on the market, his conscience kicked in and he realized he could do it no longer; so he exterminated his entire herd and started completely from scratch.
The film shows Kremer’s farm today: the pigs are unconfined and extremely healthy and happy. In his first year, he saved over $14,000 in drugs and vet bills, and for the last 14 years his farm has been antibiotic free. There hasn’t been the need; he has had no sick hogs in that entire period.
The Difference
In addition to profiling Kremer and others, Fresh spends a considerable time with sustainable farmer Joel Salatin of Swoope, Virginia, who is an enormous breath of fresh air and sunshine in comparison with shots of industrial agriculture shown earlier in the movie.
Apparently this difference was quite evident behind the scenes as well. Prior to arriving at Salatin’s farm, ana and her crew had spent two days at an industrial chicken farm in Arkansas. “I have to be honest: I couldn’t wait to leave,” ana related. “They had been spraying chemicals before they put the baby chicks in the building, chemicals that would absorb all the ammonia and other odors because nothing would be changed or cleaned for four months until the chickens were fully grown. I was there when the spraying was being done and felt really dirty. My camera even broke down because the chemicals were so corrosive. It was just nasty at that farm.
“Joel Salatin was the very opposite. I arrived at his farm and didn’t want to leave. We would wake up before dawn to shoot Joel doing his morning chores, working with the animals in the beautiful early light of day. He is so happy and he has such a happy family.”
When you see the film, you realize something else: the animals are happy too. They are proceeding exactly as nature intended, freely grazing on grasses (not feed). Salatin even makes the point that his job consists more of farming grasses than animals—for if the grasses are healthy, so will be the animals.
Salatin points out that nature’s provisions are often overlooked. The claws and beaks of chickens, for example, are cut off in industrial agriculture because they “get in the way” when fowl are so closely confined. The camera follows as the proper use of these beaks and claws are aptly demonstrated on Salatin’s farm: the chickens, brought along to follow cattle as they graze, scratch through cattle manure to find and eat fly larvae.
Salatin’s farm is also quite a profitable business. At one point, he indicates a neighboring farm which, with its dead vegetation, looks completely awful bordering Salatin’s bright green field. He says that his neighbor makes about $150 an acre from his land, producing meat with industrial methods. He himself makes twice that by following natural methods with his cattle and poultry. He even makes use of the grasses in terms of profit, selling and using them as hay at the end of each season.
There is much more to learn on Salatin’s farm—which you will discover when you see Fresh.
Other Messages of Hope
In addition to Salatin, Fresh also profiles Milwaukee’s incredible Will Allen and his urban farm, Growing Power. Allen established the farm to turn around the situation of “food deserts” in inner-city neighborhoods, where practically nothing but processed fast and snack foods are available to consumers. Allen conducts packed workshops for people from all walks of life to teach them how they and their communities can sustainably raise and eat healthy food.
Allen’s is an example of a model that ana sees as needing to occur on a broad basis. “People like Will Allen, on very little land, are producing so much food and are truly dedicated to making it available to the community,” she said. “That can happen more, but we need to be supportive of it now. We don’t have the infrastructure in most places, so we really need, basically, to put our money where our mouths are. We need to say, ‘You know what? Healthy food is for everyone.’ We need support organizations that are making this happen; we need to support cities that are wanting to do this; we need to change zoning codes and address the many layers of the issue.”
Another uplifting example of hope in action profiled in the film is that of Diana Endicott, farmer and founder of the Good Natured Family Farms co-op of Kansas City, Missouri. Pulling together the products of organic and natural farmers across her local area who could never get their products sold into big market chains, she made a deal to sell them to Hen House Market, a supermarket in Kansas City, run by a visionary named David Ball, that specializes only in local, sustainable food.
From the Ground Up
After seeing Fresh and the juxtaposition of the grim realities of industrial agriculture and the healthy, thriving potentials of the sustainable way, it becomes obvious that only individual initiative will pull it off. Yet the film and its director-producer remain positive.
With the growth in sustainable farming and a continued fight for better policy and legislation, ana sees a bright future. “If we’re able to start enforcing laws to break down monopolies and free farmers to compete, 2010 could really bring about incredibly positive change,” she said. “Clearly the way we assign money right now—federal subsidies—is not helping to create a diversified and small-farm-based economy, so that’s another thing we need to work on. Local government can do a lot to promote a healthy and competitive system by creating infrastructure. In New York State, for instance, there is a huge warehouse in the Bronx that’s the biggest in the country, where all of the food goes before it gets distributed in the different parts of the city—restaurants, supermarkets and so forth. They just opened up a separate warehouse that’s going to be for local farmers, where restaurants and health-food markets and co-ops can go and pick up food that has been brought by local farmers. That’s the kind of important infrastructure we need.”
The film’s message is probably summed up best by agricultural economist Professor John Ikerd at the end of the movie. “It’s not an impossible dream out here. I can remember when the first supermarket came in—this Piggly Wiggly store. Those changes have come in my adult lifetime—from that system where there wasn’t a supermarket to now, where it’s all supermarkets. Changes just as significant can come in the next 50 years. We can transform the whole food system. It just happens one person at a time—one farmer, one consumer, at a time.”
To find out more about Fresh, how you can see the film (which you absolutely should) and activities you can become involved in, visit the Fresh website at www.freshthemovie.com.
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