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"The Future of Foods"
"The Future of Foods"
is a must see film...
Date: 6/15/2005 2:17:13 AM ( 8 y ) ... viewed 803 times There is a powerful,
must see film making the rounds now.
Here is a story about it from the SF Cronicle:
Your Enchanted Gardener,
Leslie
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Fighting for the future of food
Deborah Koons Garcia's film documents
how genetically engineered foods slipped into our supply
Carol Ness, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, November 7, 2004
"Just about everybody is pretty serious about their chow," says Deborah Koons Garcia, enjoying the understatement. "Even if they don't eat good food, they're serious about their junk food."
No matter how serious they are, though, Garcia knows most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the American food supply, mostly from corn and canola. They're in an estimated 60 percent of all processed foods.
She wants people to understand the risks, in her view, while there's still time.
"We are at a crossroads," says Garcia, fending off the wet affections of her three Dalmatians as she explains why she's spent the last three years and a chunk of what she calls her "Jerry money" making "The Future of Food," a documentary about GMO (genetically modified organism) foods. Though Garcia has made films all her life and runs her own production company, Lily Films, she is better known as the widow of Jerry Garcia, the legendary Grateful Dead lead singer and guitarist who died in 1995.
"Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late," says Garcia, her back to the sweeping ridgetop view from the Mill Valley home she and Jerry bought not long before he died. She went ahead with their plans to add on, and made her film with a staff of six in the vast downstairs room that would have been her husband's art studio.
"The Future of Food," finished in July, will get a special two-day screening at the Castro Theatre on Thursday and Friday.
The first night's showing is a benefit for Slow Food, the international society dedicated to wresting our breakfast, lunch and dinner back from industrialization. Introducing the film will be Alice Waters, local/seasonal food guru and a Slow Food International officer, and afterward, "Botany of Desire" author and UC Berkeley journalism professor Michael Pollan will lead a panel discussion on the issues it raises. Both Pollan and Waters are just back from Terra Madre, Slow Food's annual gathering in Turin, Italy, a center of organizing against GMO foods.
Appearing on the panel along with Garcia will be two of the anti-GMO authorities who appear in her film: Andrew Kimbrell, head of the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C., and Ignacio Chapela, an assistant professor at Berkeley, whose work tracking the invasion of American GMO corn into Mexico stirred a furor.
It will be the film's highest-profile showing in the Bay Area. It's been hot on the film festival circuit. And activists have been showing it all over the country, especially as part of campaigns to ban GMO crops in Marin, Butte and San Luis Obispo counties on Tuesday's ballot. Marin voters passed the ban, following Mendocino County's lead in March, but it went down in the other counties.
"The Future of Food" is Garcia's first major film project since regrouping from a barrage of lawsuits over her husband's estate. Jerry loved film, she said, and would approve of her using some of his money -- less than $1 million -- to make it. When they lived together in the '70s, he supported her craft and would take her around to see all the films "he considered must-sees for me as a filmmaker -- 'Shadows of Our Forgotten Houses,' 'The Thin Man.' "
"He was a closet director himself, and did do some rock-'n'-roll film directing of the Dead," she says. "A fact that almost no one knows is Jerry could sing many musicals literally from beginning to end -- 'Showboat,' 'South Pacific.' "
Telling the story of how she got to where she is, it's hard to believe she began making films more than 30 years ago, at the University of North Carolina, before heading to the Bay Area for a master's in fine arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She looks a good decade younger than a child of the '60s, lithe with glossy dark hair, on this day wearing a simple white jersey pullover and white calf-length skirt over knee-high lavender Uggs.
Making films "was really just fun," she says. "I didn't think of it as a career."
She made "All About Babies," a series on early childhood development narrated by Jane Alexander, a feature film called "Poco Loco," and instigated and helped make "Grateful Dawg," about the musical collaboration of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.
"The Future of Food" evolved out of her longtime interest in food and desire to make a "really serious film and do something that wasn't about me."
Garcia became a vegetarian when she was in college (she does eat fish now), and "became one of those organic people who are evangelical and totally boring -- you know, telling people every pound of beef takes 8,000 pounds of water. I'm better now."
But she's still hyperaware of the "consequences that certain food choices have on society and on the land and on people's health."
First, she thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the "terminator" gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.
"It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue ... And it was really clear that there hadn't been a really good film that told the whole story from the cellular, from the microscopic level, all the way up to the global, which was a huge challenge -- but I just thought that's what people need to know," Garcia says.
Her 90-minute documentary feels more educational than polemic -- though it expresses a strong point of view against letting new life forms loose on the land without long-term testing of the health effects and real government controls, especially labeling of foods.
It's an issue with special resonance in California, where the economy depends on agriculture and GMO crops are gaining a toehold. Test fields of grapes, cotton, rapeseed, alfalfa, wheat, onions, corn, rice and other fruits and vegetables have won permits for California. Nationally, 100 million acres of GMO crops -- mostly corn, soy, canola and cotton -- were under cultivation by 2003, according to the film.
The issues are complicated and technically daunting -- one reason people have a hard time grasping them. But Garcia threads a clear path through the history, science and politics of GMO foods to a clear call for action.
She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the "green revolution" of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide.
Garcia leads carefully from one point to the next -- showing how the chemical companies have succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapping patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.
To make the point, Garcia goes to Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser to tell his story. He's one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company's Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field.
Monsanto accused Schmeiser of violating its Roundup Ready patent, even though Schmeiser never planted the GMO canola and didn't want it in his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.
Garcia travels with UC Berkeley's Ignacio Chapela to Mexico, where hundreds of varieties of corn thrive in different climates and soils, to show how GMO crops threaten such biodiversity. It was here that Chapela found controversial evidence that genes of GMO corn had already jumped the border to contaminate native species.
The uncontrolled spread of genetically engineered plants -- recently proven again with tests of GMO grasses -- far beyond the fields where they were planted is one of the strongest arguments the film makes for introducing safeguards.
The film questions why the U.S. government hasn't required GMO foods to undergo the rigorous testing required of medicines created by recombinant DNA technology, and why it has resisted efforts to require GMO labeling on foods, as Europe does.
Suggesting an answer, the film ticks off all the government officials who have links to Monsanto, including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
It also briefly debunks claims that GMO foods are the answer to world starvation.
Ultimately, the film is a call to action -- for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation.
While some people are seeking to ban GMOs, Garcia thinks labeling would drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.
"I want people to watch the film and say we have to stop this," says Garcia.
Long gone are the days when Garcia believed "we could have our healthy foods over here, and they could have their food over there. You do your thing and I do mine."
With genetic engineering, she says, "You can't drop out anymore -- it'll come and get us."
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"The Future of Food," at the Castro Theatre, Thursday and Friday, Nov. 11- 12. Thursday's 7 p.m. screening is a benefit for Slow Food; tickets are $10, available in advance at the theater or at http://www.ticketweb.com. Panel discussion to follow with Michael Pollan, Deborah Koons Garcia, Andrew Kimbrell and Ignacio Chapela. Post-party hosted by Om Organics at Lime, 2247 Market St.; tastes of organic foods, wine, beer; $10 in advance from http://www.omorganics.org; $15 at door if available. Benefit for Om Organics programs in the Bay Area.
E-mail Carol Ness at cness@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/07/LVG709K7MV1.DTL
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