In my previous life as a chronic academic, I taught a class called Anthropology Through Film and Fiction. We took four major cultural topics and viewed them through a variety of lenses, including films. Food is a central concern in anthropology -- from how it's produced to the rules governing when, where, and how it can be cooked and eaten -- and it was my favorite of our subjects.
There are so many great films and books about food. We watched Babette's Feast and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. We read Like Water for Chocolate and Farmer Boy, a great view of the tremendous work involved food self-sufficiency. One year, we also watched Tampopo, which is a wonderful movie about food obsessions, but the raw egg scene freaks me out too much, so after the first year it was on a list of films they could watch on their own if they wanted more. I chalk that up to my years in food service, which were pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the Northeast's salmonella scare when over-easy eggs were featured in nightmares.
Today, there is a vast cultural shift taking place on the screen. Movie after movie is vilifying industrial agriculture; celebrating the local, the organic, the small; and shining a spotlight on how we eat. After decades of growth in industrial agriculture following World War II, people are starting to say no and the movement is being both documented in and driven by films that inform and/or expose industrial agriculture and the diet it supports. We have seen our national government resisting these changes, in the fight to continue to count pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables, for instance. This cultural shift, like so many, is being driven by grassroots action and even grassroots documentation.
There are too many films to name, but here are links for many of the films that have crossed my radar and that I've either seen or want to see:
King Corn
Forks Over Knives
Food, Inc.
Supersize Me
Fridays at the Farm
Dirt: The Movie
Fresh
Food Stamped
The Garden
As We Sow
Food Matters
In Search of Good Food
There are many others out there. Have you seen any of these? Do you have a review to share? Do you know of other movies that should be on this list? Use our comments section to share!
Over the past three weeks, I have been fairly obsessed with The Hunger Games trilogy, written by Suzanne Collins. I'm not entirely sure how I overlooked this series. I love speculative fiction and the books closely resemble Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and sequels. But I have made up for my lapse, reading all three twice. I'm in the middle of the first book for the third time. I'll have to think hard about seeing the soon-to-be-released movie. These are the kinds of books that I want to know really well before seeing someone else's imagining of them.
You may be thinking, "Other than the title, what does this have to do with food, hunger, and community?" Well, those themes run through the books, definitely, but there is a more direct link. The World Food Programme and Feeding America have teamed up with the film debut to bring hunger into public discourse. Their Hunger Games website features a video message from the stars of The Hunger Games, a quiz about hunger, and information about how to donate to both organizations.
For one in six households in the United States, hunger is no game. It is a stark reality they face every day and it affects us all whether we directly experience hunger or not. Hungry employees and coworkers cannot work at full capacity. Hungry children cannot learn as well as their peers. And more and more, it is clear: children who fall behind in early grades will likely struggle for much of their lives. Our whole community -- whether you view community locally or globally -- is hurt when members of the community are hungry.
The Hunger Games is fiction, of course, but hunger, in this country and around the world, is very real. If you are able, please consider making a donation to one of these fine organizations, or locally to Community Assistance Network, Rural Human Services, or Our Daily Bread Ministries, all of whom work to prevent hunger in our community.
