How Corporations Are Ruining Your Health (Food Industry Documentary) | Real Stories

remember the old days the pies your mother used to make you'd go into the kitchen there's mom breaking eggs beaten them there be rich country cream and sugar fresh fruit and real vanilla beans and butter remember all that well you can forget it [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] when we walk through the supermarket we're bombarded with choices fresh or frozen low-fat or lots of fat Cool Ranch or nacho cheese with so much variety we assume that some of its healthy some of its junk and at least we have a choice but do we is picking the best from a pile of flavorless tomatoes really a choice or worki choices about what we eat made for us long before we walked into the store the industrial food system is not doing what a food system needs to do which is not just produce lots of food but to keep a population healthy industrial food system is making us very sick in many many different ways there is the obesity epidemic there is diabetes four out of ten leading killers in this country are our food-related chronic diseases I'm really worried about what's going to happen in this country if we don't sort of wake up and understand the consequences of every decision that we make about everything that we eat every day there's a big problem with food in our country today large commodity producers and large agribusinesses hijacked and taken over the farm subsidy programs and it's resulting in production of food types that aren't healthy for us Americans our government food policy promotes eating junk food it really does the rewards go to the people who make junk foods so in a sense our current food system promotes obesity one of the most remarkable things I think about this rise industrial food in the second half of 20th century is that it's been underwritten by taxpayer dollars if you listen to debates there's never anything about it takes people like us the sustainable food people to bring up that stuff and when we go and we get involved in the policy piece of the farm bill it's like we're going up against Goliath and we really lose almost every time American food policy starting really in the nineteen in the teens and into 20s was to supply supply people with the most amount of food at the lowest price and that's not that I mean that's not something to be sneered at these days when everybody has plenty it's hard to remember when the South was the pellagra Belt and when people really did not have enough food to eat it's hard to believe it now but there was a time when many Americans were starving in the Great Depression farmers were producing plenty of food but no one could afford to buy it so farmers started going out of business under the farm bill Uncle Sam paid farmers not to grow so many crops by keeping supply down the bill kept prices steady for the farmers but after World War two things began to change new farming chemicals led to bigger harvests and new petroleum fuelled machines were created to keep up with the surge starvation was history but the explosion of food into the marketplace overwhelmed the government's ability to manage supply and demand in the 1970s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz had a different idea in a complete 180 the government abandoned small farmers in favour of large mega farms that could churn out as much food as possible all we had to do was find someone to eat this avalanche of cheap low-quality food in just two generations a nation wracked by hunger ate its way into obesity diabetes and all sorts of other problems and now the health of Americans is just well depressing it's quite an accomplishment that we've managed to make ourselves so fat so fast in this country there are a lot of reasons for it but but one central reason is we got really good at producing huge quantities of cheap food we thought we had to industrialize everything including how to grow vegetables from tomatoes or grow and raise cattle and all of a sudden we found out there's no taste you taste it everything tastes like nothing we're designed to eat healthy good flavorful delicious food that's why we have taste buds food in it you know if we're just us to eat paste I wouldn't have taste buds right studies also showing that the intensity of aromas and flavors from properly grown vegetables are stronger and it goes hand-in-hand with nutrition there's more micronutrients there's more macro nutrients like vitamin A there's more antioxidants there's no question anymore that the nutritional quality of our food supply is declining with time the food system has serious problems it's not doing what we needed to do and more and more people are recognizing that to develop other ways of feeding ourselves other whole systems for feeding ourselves is very wise and the precautionary thing to do given how the industrial food system is struggling right now so food in America is a sad story of unintended consequences government got us out of the frying pan and into the deep fryer now our grocery stores are packed with a bunch of junk luckily for us there were a few passionate people who remembered what good healthy food was supposed to taste like but the battle lines for this food fight were drawn in an earlier conflict actually it was kind of a big one with the outbreak of World War 2 food wasn't just food it was national defense among those called to the Armed Forces we discovered an appalling number of young men who were undernourished or improperly fed another standard of physical fitness essential to our part fighting army 400,000 were rejected many because of physical fitness due to malnutrition war and agriculture have all sorts of connections they have since World War two as the saying goes an army marches on its stomach so the army spent tons of money figuring out how to get food to soldiers fighting overseas they came up with some nifty ideas dehydration flash freezing and lightweight packaging portability was the top priority taste not so much this necessity to get calories to soldiers to keep them fighting the field turns into this ability to market processed food to average working people enter decay ration grandfather to the modern TV dinner these war foods are also bulwarks against famines and catastrophe to produce them we have a new in the this company it tends to make K a package meet business when people come thanks to the war we also learned how to make bigger and better bombs and it turned out the same chemistry could be used to make bigger and better fertilizers you see plants need nitrogen to grow and we'd never found a good way to get it to them but with the new artificial fertilizers we could give plants all the nitrogen they could want and big agriculture exploded there was one other giant industry feeding the agriculture boom as it has in the past America's oil industry will continue to supply power for the farmer to accomplish a job that's now worldwide until the industrialization of food in America wouldn't have been possible without the big oil companies and the petroleum industry quickly became one of the current system's biggest beneficiaries the way we farm now petroleum is in just about everything and we're not just talking about fuel for the tractors more and better insecticide weed killers fertilizer better lubricants to protect machinery against the wear and tear of frickin and continually better fuels new bigger equipment guzzled even more gas and soon farm productivity reached an all-time high our farmers are producing about six thousand calories per person per day you should only be eating about 2,000 calories per person per day so you have a situation of oversupply of food coming off of the farm when you've got huge quantities of cheap food the food industry will figure out how to make people eat them children often need between meals snacks for an adequate diet snacks like hostess Twinkies they help your child go and grow processed foods came in for a couple of reasons one was there were all these commodities and you had to do something with them and this was a way to take cheap commodities and turn them into cheap foods the other was changes in social patterns so that women went into the workforce and there was a tremendous demand for convenience and so food companies said ah you want convenience we can do that and all say what food magic the magician and here's your prepared dinner in the 50s Americans got a taste of the future suddenly the kitchen was packed with newfangled gizmos that promised to make cooking as easy as pushing a button somewhere between science and marketing everything seemed possible it was a prepackaged atomic-powered space-age and we loved it this industry rose up that was very very good at at creating what would become convenience food and it was presented to the housewife as it was like having a maid IRA's made sure maid service on a grand scale for America's millions of salad bowls meet some of the cooks you hire when you buy convenience food these women are checking fresh potatoes before making them into an instant match the cooking was of course being done off you know like in factories away from you but he could go and get some ready whipped cream so instead of having her maid do it it was done in a factory announcing a definite improvement on whipped cream with non-dairy topping a lot of the emphasis was on convenience making things easy to prepare and what got sacrificed in many cases was taste flavor stop you don't have to peel onions or mess with garlic hey snap push-button foods are here push button flavor was the greatest idea since sliced bread so what if it tasted nothing like the real thing we were told that cookie was drudgery we didn't want to do that we want to get fast food this all prepared over there but in fact it's for me and so incredibly relaxing it's like a you know you're you're opening up all of your senses your nose your eyes your ears your hands you're just in this food in American culture in the 20 in the second half of 20th century a lot of the things that we a lot of the simple pleasures of life were we're getting sort of traded away for convenience Americans didn't know what Pease tasted like our corn tasted like our chicken tasted like her eggs tasted like because they've had all these things that had sat around in a warehouse or been frozen and thawed and so on and so forth things came out of the freezer they were in a convenient package they were they were coming in portions and it looked like food and it had many aspects of food but it didn't really have very much flavor nothing had had a singing taste nothing made you feel as if you were you were part of the carrot or the carrot was part of you today's parade of improved crops is sometimes taken for granted lab research has bred into them special qualities or fresh youth freezing and canning there's a great big difference between the green beans that we ate yesterday compared to the green beans that we ate in the 1900s fruits and vegetables are often completely processed canned labeled and crated ready to ship within a few hours after they have been picked in the fields the quality of our food is measured by how it'll ship rather than how it tastes food on the move Criss crossing the country in that traveling they lose their taste the chemicals that are used on them result in a product that just doesn't taste as good as the old-fashioned one the tomato is a prime example it's been selected for storage and for keeping rather than for flavor and the qualities the consumer really wants in a tomato they have to be picked green and and packed and held in freezers of refrigerators and shipped Long's distances and so they don't have that those quality sugars that all we moon come at maturity and the nature of the sugars changes of fruit ripens and and it's those sugars that really very important in bringing the quality of a fruit to us supermarkets need nothing to look the same way completely have everything the same size the same color this one is like eating cotton you know it has no flavor at all why eat it and why pay your money why spend your hard-earned money on something which yes no flavor industrial agriculture had essentially ruined the quality of most American produce this was the era of those three little pink tomatoes in the cellophane container in the little plastic box I had forgotten about tomatoes I had forgotten about when I was two years old eating my way down a row of peas I'd forgotten what food tasted like I'd forgotten utterly it was like I had a really bad cold during the 1950's taking a nation that thought Twinkies were good for you and reminding them what real food tasted like wasn't going to be easy in fact it would take a revolution the conformist 50s were overrun by the rebellious 60s and a new counterculture was born epicenter of this cultural earthquake was Berkeley California but people with pissed-off loud and hungry for change I arrived in Berkeley instead of front and center on the Free Speech Movement that was going on this right at the time of the Vietnam War and there were a lot of protests and kind of a feeling that we had to create our own culture if you will it's a different counterculture a very important part of the 60s counterculture was decided that the personal is political and that you could not separate your politics from the conduct of your life and that how you live and how you ate was all of this was a political statement the food movement did have its beginnings in that political movement we wanted to change all the ways that we were doing things people were starting farms growing around know there was this understanding that industrial agriculture was part of the military industrial complex [Music] there were direct intersections in the in the 60s between corporations that were profiting from the war in Vietnam in corporations that were profiting from the industrialization of farming and the poisoning of America's farm fields the war machine was very much implicated in agriculture in America Monsanto the maker of Agent Orange was the maker of the worst pesticides Dow Chemical was a major producer of agrochemicals and also was a major producer of war chemicals stuff like napalm etc the same company was actually poisoning our farm fields and poisoning peasants in Vietnam there was this real sense that in fighting the Vietnam War you were fighting a set of companies that were very implicated in that I was definitely part of that kind of thinking which led ultimately to my opening the restaurant I think al Assad thought there was something missing from the revolution here in Berkeley and that was adequate attention to the sensual component to the the pleasures of everyday life and specifically food most of the people in the Free Speech Movement were classic 60s radicals they didn't care what the war they didn't care what they looked like nothing for us that they certainly didn't care what they ate they chips and beer all night and I was offended me the way people were eating out of paper bags on the table all the rest and here we were talking about big corporations and they're there buying from Alice began catering the revolution essentially she was feeding people who were holed up on campus closing down buildings she just began to develop the idea that maybe she'd like appetizers that maybe there could be a restaurant that would embody all these values that she had become so deeply committed to Alice wanted to combine her love of food with her passion for politics little did she know by opening Chez Panisse Alice Waters would be firing the first shot Hulan airy revolution I wanted to be a political place I wanted it to be a place where people brainstormed ideas and diverse groups of people gathered in conversation with good food she always believed that dining together around good food is progressive in itself and would lead to talking about the real problems in our personal lives as for hosting and the society we needed to change the subversive aspect is to introduce people to new things that they like not to beat them over the head with rhetoric that has never converted anyone to anything Chez Panisse leads with pleasure it's about pleasure first everything else follows this sort of revolutionary idea that that pleasure is important that pleasure is under attack from the process industrialization ended up resonating a lot with people the restaurant was this great experiment or educated it was a continual astonishment and a source of enormous pleasure Chez Panisse was a place for people to come and share their views and and share their lives and become part of something bigger than just a restroom Chez Panisse was a popular place to enjoy a great meal and some enlightened conversation but it wasn't about to change the world at least not yet it was still missing one crucial ingredient an out-of-work architect whose hobby happened to be gourmet cooking I think what really turned the corner for Chez Panisse in a lot of ways and in for some for Northern California was when Jeremiah tower showed up to work there Jeremiah Tara came to the restaurant early on and I was a very insecure cook and he was a very strong sense of I think that's they had a service diplomatically the imperiousness great confidence trying to be a little diplomatic but not be to diplomatic energy condescension I was very insecure in my cooking and he wasn't he was very pretentious elegant swashbuckling okay these beautiful ideas and that's ready to accomplish them and in all the detail Jeremiah would came in with that sense of there's no other way to put it flamboyance you know this is gonna be spectacular you're not gonna believe this you're not gonna believe what we're gonna do here he came with this amiss fund of knowledge of classical French cooking and somehow my brain is wired so that I could read a 200 year old recipe and taste the food so that help will later on I knew what the flavors had to be and once you know that you can actually find your way there Alice is kind of you know hippy wearing Mary Jane shoes and funky old dresses from the 20s but she fell in love with this big blonde glamorous totally self-confident character Jeremiah was a marvelous cook and he completely transformed the restaurant Jeremiah produced these spectacular multi-course meals with different sauces unheard-of ingredients and recipes that literally had never been seen before in the United States this is at a time of course when chefs weren't glamorous they were just workmen technicians he was an artiste Jeremiah and Alice was fearless in their culinary risk-taking they created menus that celebrated their love of both food and culture themed menus with a literary twist a tribute to Alice B toklas for example or a Gertrude Stein dinner who knows what goes into a four-course evening of Salvador Dali but no doubt dessert was surreal most the time it was excellent every now and then it was inedible there was an episode with eel that did not work in 1976 Jeremiah's experimentation culminated in a groundbreaking meal he called the California Regional dinner the politically aware diners of Berkeley ate it up they were amazed to learn that exotic ingredients didn't have to come all the way from Europe they could be found right in their own backyards that dinner was quite famous I impressed myself with that I must say we gathered all of the ingredients nearby and sort of native Tomales Bay oysters and Guerra pata trout from Big Sur everything was local and it was remarkably prescient that became really important to the whole philosophy of the restaurant that we identified where those foodstuffs came from this meal paired with the revolutionary spirit of Chez Panisse launched local food onto the national stage it was the dawn of a new era and it was delicious after the regional event everyone went wow we are in a wonderful region called California why don't we just relax and be Californians and cook the Americans maybe American food can be great again Jeremih towers breakthrough had been a victory for delicious local food everywhere meanwhile across the country in Washington DC plans were being cooked up to industrialize food on a massive scale the budding local food movement was in danger of being inverted Lee stomped down by of all things the US Department of Agriculture before Earl Butz the goal of federal food policy was careful management of supply and demand this was about to change we're gonna make this industry pay and the way you make it economically attractive is to regain respectability for a very simple six letter word it's spelled P ro f I T Earl Butz was a very mercurial character he was a very flamboyant character he shot straight from the hip I've got a name that lends itself to puns and I'm the first one to pun on it some of my friends at Purdue University sent me that sign the other day he's a professor Purdue an executive with ralston purina and when he became Secretary of the Department of Agriculture he very much bought into this idea but farming as a way to create cheap food for 40 years my philosophy has been on the side of the private sector he started the process of peeling back and dismantling these New Deal mechanisms and basically telling farmers to plant fence or Defense Road don't leave any land fallow grow as much food as you possibly can and if you're not big get bigger get out Earl Butz set out to apply his big business mindset to agriculture his pitch to farmers was this grow as much food as you can we'll do our best to help you sell it anything you can't sell to Americans will slough off on the Russians ah don't you worry about your pocketbook if prices fall we've got your back instead of supporting farmers for not growing food farmers were encouraged to grow more food and they did so with enormous efficiency it sounds like a great idea capitalism at work everybody wins right the real beneficiary of the subsidy system is not farmers because they were struggling in this industry where they are the low-cost producer the real beneficiary were the buyers of the grain the buyers the corn and the wheat and the soy that could buy the product at a very cheap price and then process it into something and sell it at a higher price we're talking about companies like Archer Daniels Midland I'm talking about Cargill which processed the corn and soy into all these products that end up in supermarket shelf cheese old not real cheese a delicious imitation of cheese it has less than 20% of the milk fat of cheese the rest has been replaced by golden corn oil what the farm bill does is to subsidize commodity ingredients commodity ingredients get turned into very highly profitable processed foods my front doors corn sweeteners and to replace imported sugar in soft drinks and countless other foods nutritionally complete food blends for feeding hungry people throughout the world horn gets turned into corn sweeteners soybeans get turned into soy oil would turn up in a lot of cheap food products and these food products are cheaper on a per calorie basis than our fruits and vegetables which are considered by the Department of Agriculture to be specialty crops and not worthy of the kind of attention that corn soybeans cotton and wheat get so in a sense our current food system promotes obesity pioneering new foods to meet today's and tomorrow's nutritional challenges [Music] that is how a DM uses America's abundance to meet the world's needs the whole process ends up being shot through with cheap corn it's the oil that they fry vit McNugget in it's the feed that fed the chicken it's it's the breading on the McNugget and so you know basically nutrition ends up narrowing down to this seemingly endless variety of products that are really basically iterations of cheap corn and soy government subsidies go to pay for exactly the ingredients that end up in the profitable junk foods that end up adding calories to people's diets they don't really need what you really want people to be eating is fruits vegetables whole grains meat and dairy products and all those foods that are on the periphery of the supermarket next time you hit the supermarket you can check it out for yourself around the periphery is the good stuff produce meats dairy but to get to any of it we have to walk through rows and rows of processed junk that isn't a coincidence there's a definite link between the policies that Earl Butz promoted which meant greater farm consolidation the integration of Agriculture and the type of food production system that we have today it's led to a farm subsidy program going to the largest commodity producers at the expense of everyone else and a food system that isn't healthy for us Americans this entire system is based on producing a whole ton of food that's making us sick if you look at the cost of food as a percentage of income over time in the United States in the past thirty years you get a steadily downward graph and that is sort of the triumph of industrial food and that's the triumph of rural but so you can point to that chart and say look what does it worked but if you take the same chart and you look at the per capita expenditures on health care over time over the same period is going in the opposite direction and so what we're doing as a society is we're spending money that we used to spend on good quality healthy food and we're spending it on health care on treating the consequences of this cheap food system that we've created so Earl Butz his triumph ends up being extremely expensive costly damaging hurtful of human beings [Music] this is common old-fashioned genetics that's what we always use this is Denver's 126 carat which has have been around for a hundred years as standard old standard old carat very fine grain very firm is that carat organic or is it just happy to see me Bob cannard has been growing incredible crops for years but in 1975 a farmer like him had no way to distribute them I started in farming at a peak of the industrialized ship it in from every place don't grow it locally kind of agricultural foundation and the only thing locally was grown was the local family garden and I wanted to grow a big local family garden so I could feed many of my neighbors and yet there wasn't a means to be able to do this in a market flooded with commodity crops would anyone still care about a few good vegetables looking for the organic local fund before branching I was simply looking for taste and in the process of looking for taste I found those people what Chez Panisse stands for today the seasonality the simplicity the total focus on ingredients the focus on pure food without pesticides herbicides or other pollutants anywhere or moral pollutants for that matter in its history that was all to come from Alice she just simply said I'm not gonna settle for ingredients that don't taste good who would ever have guessed that the taste of vegetables would turn out to be the start of a revolution she wasn't a a missionary for organic agriculture she was a missionary for really high-quality produce and as it turns out the way you get high-quality produce is growing it organically what gives taste is the soil this is the part that everyone's been forgetting about oh it's a wonderful smell as a matter of fact would you like to smell something when you pick up a handful of soil in the organic farm you're picking up essentially a living organism there's all sorts of microorganisms and bacteria that not only fix nitrogen to the soil but efficiently transmit that nitrogen into plants and other other micronutrients that get leached out in industrial agriculture biology and minerals in a symbiosis create taste because they're really what are making the flavors they're making the acids they're making esters ooh they're making all this stuff we have no idea how to do that as precisely as this earth can do it without the pot plant that well grown pest it's complete nutritional integrity so it gets to form and function it's from all of its metabolic systems as it becomes physically complete and internally devoid of hunger you get refinement in textures and Oromos and geometries and on the template what's important here is not how the fertilizers don't do things about how the biology really does so when the biology is gone all you're left with is this sort of soluble liquid that can it's like an IV for the plant once your life is done you're stuck on an IV for the last remaining potential - you can be cut down to eat the vegetable it's not a little quick blown pale yellow uniform selected I don't know what kind of resolution you can get on that if you can see right through that guy but you'll see the solidness up you look at it in a ten power magnification even you see the solidness and the fine grain of it and each cell is filled with his protoplasm that's the goal to build Chez Panisse Alice had to build a whole food chain and I don't think she meant to do that I don't think that was her idea she wanted to serve really good food but she couldn't find that produce 85% of cooking is finding the ingredients and the early days of Chez Panisse and they would canvass the Berkeley neighborhoods looking for fruit looking for lettuces doing all these different kinds of things the chefs at Chez Panisse suddenly had lightning in a bottle by serving up food that came straight from the local farmer they gave their customers what they wanted to eat instead of what the government wanted to sell this is kind of the philosophy of the restaurant to buy food in season two carrots three phenols three leeks three chervil service simply six endive three escarole two radicchio and also to buy food that's locally available savory sore old time and all add manzanita wood to that inspired to obtain only the freshest ingredients Chez Panisse rejected the entire concept of industrialized food it might have started with the search for some fresh radicchio but soon everything the restaurant served was local they hadn't just improved the menu they'd set a whole new food economy in motion we built a network of suppliers that were directly connected to the restaurant so we gave them the money and they brought us the produce and the meat and this created an economy that was outside of the middleman and the normal distribution system farmers markets came into the mix in late 70s the the enabling legislation in California was in 1977 all of a sudden a farmer who grew something that was different or it grew something that had great flavor could get paid more money for it instead of having to have a 400 acre farm to be able to make a middle-class income if you could grow the right things on 30 acres you could make almost as much money and I think that there was a real symbiotic relationship there between the chef's who were looking for these the most perfect most pristine most flavorful ingredients in these small growers who were saying you know I never wanted to be selling the Safeway in the first place so now here's someplace where I can actually sell things I can make enough money to keep my farm going and do things I feel good about the farmers market was a wonderful venue and cause little farmers got to sell stuff threat to the customer and and coming to those farmers markets came restaurant tours that I they have diversity we have choice we have something different than the restaurant down the street has they became inspired and they inspired us the restaurants back and forth the fact that that chefs come to do farmers markets and they kind of create a scene around a farmers market and then they market that product in the under menus will identify a farmer that makes a huge difference by highlighting their ingredients and naming where they came from on their menus high-profile chefs refocused the spotlight on local farmers and the public followed in droves why not show where the chef's show with the movement in full force Americans realized when it came to buying food we finally had a choice during that five-year period of time farmers markets proliferated all around the Bay Area and down into Santa Cruz where most of these counterculture people arose that wanted to grow and provide foods for the local marketplace this was a movement that was already gathering steam and the more farmers markets there were the better the farmers did the more people win into small-scale organic farming and so the choice is multiplied and the integrity of the operations increased as well now there were farmers springing all over the place and raising food that was just better and better and better farmers markets allow farmers to recapture more of the food dollar it basically gets them out of the commodity market of selling an undifferentiated commodity that's going into a huge pile with everybody else's potatoes or everybody else's milk and suddenly they're connecting directly with the end user which is to say the eater and not the whole commodity system and that's enormous boon to them not to mention to us heaters for more than 25 years now American chefs have been seeking out the best ingredients and finding them locally but you don't have to run a world-class restaurant to get your hands on the good stuff we are at the Wednesday Santa Monica farmers market beautiful Santa Monica when we come we come here every week at the shop for the red both restaurants this is the big market that's why we all do what we do okay look for what spring now what's beautiful a special surprise and then also to touch the farmers to find out what's coming up next and just to kind of get invigorated and excited about what we do the market went away and someone told me like okay we just call this number and order whatever you want I literally don't know what I would do I mean I would maybe have to go do something else there's a lot of good reasons to buy locally and to work within the local framework environmentally it's a better thing the food tastes better it's better for us it's not pumped full of chemicals it's not picked early and gas to become ripe when they want it to come right it's not been sitting I was super market shelf for me at the restaurant I think the choices that we make every day our choices for the small independent guy the local farmer / big grower the agribusiness hmm political activism never tasted so good [Music] [Applause] [Music] so the beginnings always a little like my name is Sarah and I'm the sous chef here at SLU every Sunday of course is different and it reflects with switz in the market something with what the weather's like this is the Bloomsdale spinach that Suzanne tried at the farmers market from Alex Weiser it's an heirloom spinach it doesn't have as much tannin as other varieties it's a really sweet spinach I'm doing this warm warm spinach salad with the chicken saltimbocca sultan book is a classic Italian dish it means jump in the mouth and it's so delicious it just jumps it just jumps in your mouth and we're gonna garnish that with the pomegranate salsa we get our pomegranates from Peter shader who grows pomegranates and the most amazing citrus in Southern California Susan's been working with him for a long time he actually delivers all of our Wednesday market soda Big Mama granite seeds with diced shallot pomegranate molasses lemon juice olive oil parsley spooned over the top [Music] working a lude really is a dream come true working with Susanna and we get to work with the farmers and we get to go and see them at the market that's why I work here I'm Stephanie and I'm the pastry assistant here at least right now persimmons are are really great these are the Fuyu persimmons are a little bit harder these were just gonna slice up to put ice cream on and then you have some of the high Chia which we use to make a compote this is like one of my favorite times of the year so the persimmons [Music] [Music] nationally I feel I feel like California cuisine has sort of moved moved east I definitely want to eat out in New York I feel it much more now than I did five years ago or ten years ago it's a regional market driven you know seasonal approach to cooking and I think people there are much more interested in farmers markets and finding heirloom products local products the heart of it has moved his spread and we kind of become its own thing I always try and shop at a farmers market because I like to cook I like the fact that the food changes throughout the year if I want one beautiful bell pepper I can buy one I don't have to buy a package I can definitely tell when I am eating healthy and eating this sort of produce well I really want to buy everything that's local I don't use any unnecessary fossil fuels if I don't have to and it also tastes better often we bring our dogs it's a lot of fun so the food is definitely healthier for my daughter and I like it myself it tastes better I'm big on the eggplant right now I don't know why sometimes we even take a little things I'm flattening my home too it's just one other part of New York honey why don't you watch because everything is fresh natural I know if these had some terrific food I just was at the farmers market this morning and brought some great organic strawberries Tristar strawberries and where are the strawberries you sold them on I don't have any for today is that what you're saying yes call him oh who is that George hey John George can you get what how can you come here one second I just want to grab them one strawberry hold on Tristar is a real small fragile it's a non-commercial variety this Barry found a home in New York City the French chefs and the little ladies that come up with me they be like this is how it operates to close the table it's lovely they tell me that you know you can support local agriculture and your immediate local locality even in the middle of the winter it takes a little more planning it takes a tiny bit more sacrifice but not a lot I think this whole thing is spreading all over the country we were just in Vermont for shopping we went to all the local markets in Vermont I'm from the Midwest originally and I live in Jackson Hole Wyoming I'm from Kansas City and we go every Saturday morning to our local farmers market it seems but each week almost there's more farmers here and more people for one thing I mean it I think people are really starting to pick up on the fact that it's important to pay attention to where your food comes 25 years ago it was this tiny little snowboard today is like a big steaming avalanche moving forward it's not stopping it's continuing to move and behavior and better farmers markets are starting to take root across the country but it's not so easy for some people to reach them Wolfgang Puck might be up to his ears in arugula but what if you live in a low-income area of an inner city or in a region that's buried in snow after year some people can't even track down a dull banana let alone a local farmer thankfully a handful of political activists are stepping up to fill in the gaps [Music] my name is Will Allen I'm a farmer I'm also the director of growing power here in Milwaukee which is a not not-for-profit organization that does work worldwide around the agricultural system what's my favorite food I don't want to say go growing power exists to try to make sure that healthy safe affordable food is available for all people regardless of their economic status food means a lot of things to me of course you know looking at my size you can tell that I've always ate very well growing up on a farm food is meant to me being able to eat in a sustainable way of course back then we weren't talking about sustainability or organic or whatever but we always grow food without chemicals using natural means the reason that big egg doesn't grow delicious food that's not really there ain't their aim is to make dollars you know to grow delicious food you got to grow soil this comes from compost this also comes from the food waste from the corporate food system that comes from California and it's stuff that they didn't sell pallets of apples and tomatoes and that sort of thing because just hold on I'll show you something thirty years ain't you nice-looking greens is will this will unless if we want to get your waist I I understand we didn't pick it up for a couple of times let's start rolling money that's how it's done it's done it's done it's done it's done you can grow a variety of different cool weather crop things like beet greens corn mash mizuna and we grow things specifically worked for chefs if chef calls me and says can you grow this particular green I'll grow at point [Music] I think we missed a couple generations from where we've got totally disconnected from passing on the art of growing even growing food in the backyard one of the things that I I decided to do was to open up the facility to the community it was an opportunity for me to introduce them to what really what does a tomato really taste like and what does a cucumber taste like and what does basil taste like our salad mix I believe that the local seasonal kind of you know 100-mile diet all that kind of stuff is very late yeah yeah it's a little elitist we have kids that have never tasted you know a fresh tomato and that's who we're trying to work with we're not trying to get them to only eat something within a certain amount of miles people like Will Allen and his daughter Erica are doing what the government isn't making sure everybody has a choice everyone deserves to have their basic human rights covered and one of them is food and people don't have equal access to food Community Food Security is currently a missing civil right if you go to certain certain areas of say Chicago or even Milwaukee you won't find grocery stores so people have to eat at corner stores they can't eat food like we have here if people don't have good nourishing food they can't be productive it can't be healthy I mean those things are all mitigating factors and ability for community to thrive and we don't have that [Music] my dad would always say to me someday you'll thank me because you'll know how to grow food and all the other people who don't know how grow food and it's you know it's pretty prophetic because that is Venice the state of affairs that we have generations now that not only don't know how to grow food I don't even know what all food tastes like don't know how to prepare it and those basic things that you need as a human being to sustain yourself this garden is the cabrini-green community garden partnership I think most people in America know about the pretty green is one of the first housing developments that was put in many generations now have grown up in what was once designed just to be temporary housing it's predominantly african-american very very low-income the very disenfranchised this garden is approximately a quarter of an acre of surface growing space but it's probably like more of an acre because of the compression of how we grow produce I would say we could probably easily feed 200 people a week in this garden I think exemplifies how food production can be beautiful can be educational and can also be very profitable people have to take control of their food system people have to grow in their backyard get rid of the long really this is about you know addressing power and privilege and doing so with your food what we're doing is civil rights part two it's part of dr. Martin Luther King's dream of beloved communities and part of that is having fresh safe healthy food so we're we're doing it [Music] good food should be a right and not a privilege and I think people see it as something only for the people who can afford it but really what we need to do is bring this good food into the public school system and make it available for every child who lives in this country right now we're feeding them food that isn't good for them school lunches making our kids sick the CDC has said that of the children born in the year 2000 one out of every three Caucasians and one out of every two African Americans and Hispanics will have diabetes in their lifetime and further most before they graduate high school the results going to be these same kids born in the year 2000 they're going to be the first generation in our country's history to die at a younger age and their parents so food is making our kids sick and school has to take the lead schools absolutely have to take the lead to turn this around [Music] I started the Edible Schoolyard because I was worried about the future of our kids the goal of the Edible Schoolyard program is to get students to learn about where the food comes from and learn about sharing food as a community pick out one more at the beginning of the year it's always important to bring the sixth graders into the garden through food and through taste and through seducing them into the project one of the ways that we've done that is over the years we've developed a sort of tradition of every sixth grader harvesting grilling and eating a fresh year of corn out of the garden so that's what they're doing today [Music] all right the last couple of years we've added a sort of taste comparison with corn that we've grown in the garden and corn that we've purchased at Moraine market down the street you're going to each taste half of the your a thorn from the garden and then half is from the market and we're going to do a little bit of comparing of the tube going from the garden [Music] and this will taste better it's like this is nasty it's unanimous that the garden corn is is better delicious all right the Edible Schoolyard is important because we're teaching kids to think critically about the food choices that they're making that when you decide what kind of food you're going to buy you're affecting your health but you're also affecting the environment and the community that you live in that these choices are more than just outside you know what you're doing for yourself sort of like toothpaste [Music] Karen Buerkle we are trying to totally change the paradigm so we have the delicious nutritious food in the cafeterias we are coordinating that with our hands-on experience of learning and cooking and gardening classes and as well academic curriculum so we're really trying to change children's relationship to food to save our kids and probably the planet as well we need to bring this delicious food into the public school system and feed it to every single child every single day from kindergarten all the way through high school the goal is to make edible school yards around the country in programs school programs nationwide what we need is to get politicians to say these are important we need to fund this we need to give money towards educating kids about where our food comes from a lot of people have gotten together to figure out how to create a program they can really feed our children but this isn't a program that can be funded in this way because we're talking about rebuilding kitchens we're talking about hiring of teachers we're talking about paying farmers the real price of food and we either pay upfront for this or we pay out back this needs to be funded by the federal government by the state government nobody is standing up for our children and that's what we as citizens in our country of a democracy have to do [Music] [Music] I'm Representative Ron kind represent third congressional district of western Wisconsin I ran for Congress because I hope to make a difference in people's lives and I decided to take a leadership role with the farm bill because of the implications it has for all of us throughout the country for too long farm policy has resulted in billions of dollars of subsidies going to a few but very large and very wealthy entities who then gobble up family farms around them drive up land values and make it virtually impossible for new beginning farmers to enter the business today 70% of the agricultural subsidies are going to the largest and wealthiest 10% of the producers and yet those who are producing specialty crops for instance the fruit and vegetables the things we need to be consuming more off in order to battle the obesity epidemic childhood obesity they get nothing in the way of subsidies at all and yet they're the majority of agriculture production here in the United States you know the kind of flake amendment was really a statement about the future of food policy where we're gonna go with this farm bill clearly if we did the farm bill right this year it could be the healthy food bill of the 21st century what we propose in our amendment would be significant new investments in other priority areas we have a 1.2 billion dollar increase for specialty crops and a healthy food program to combat the obesity epidemic which is ravaging our nation we also had provisions in there that encourage local production that allowed a transition program for farmers to get into organic production the establishment of farmer markets and food to cafeteria programs for our schools this is what happens when people aren't on the Agriculture Committee and get involved in this very complex area congressman Collin Peterson I'm chairman of the House Agriculture Committee the goal of the farm bill is to make sure that we have the most efficient low-cost production agriculture that we can have I've heard that the goal is to maintain a a low-cost food system for the American consumer but I think the typical consumer realizes that our farmers need to make it different a decent living - there's a lot of forces out there trying to get us to change what we're doing and we are changing but you can't just pull the rug out from under what we've been doing for the last hundred years the arguments always wait five years from now you know this is too much too soon and I've been here for a while I've been through a couple of farm bill debate those five years never do arrive at your doorstep but you also have some very powerful and entrench special interests whose job it is to protect the status quo the farm state politicians that have taken over the major Senate and House committees they're on the payroll of the large farming interests in their states and so you get this the situation that we have now where there's a lot of public outcry about the farm bill and people are hungry for reform they're hungry for information about how the farm bill works but at the same time these voices are completely marginalized in Washington when you go up up against the the very powerful lobby but also agriculture committees that are the true beneficiaries of these farm subsidies it's very difficult then to convince enough colleagues that that reform can happen today rather than waiting five years from now madam Speaker I rise today in opposition to the kind amendments and in opposition to any amendment trying to destroy the farm bill I just want people to know what this bill actually does and it does not do what some people have been saying I rise in in opposition to my good friend from Wisconsin's piece of legislation it's well-meaning but I believe it does not address the needs of my district what we want for our future vast corporate style egg production our family farmers the kind of intimate make be kind to someone but it's not to American farm families I thank the gentleman Minnesota I can't say enough good things about the wonderful work he's done as chairman of this committee [Music] madam chair the fundamental fact is that when you've got two thirds of the subsidy program in this farm bill going to just 30 congressional districts who are well represented on the committee I think it's unrealistic to expect that that committee is going to produce a policy statement that embraces reform and new ideas I should know I used to serve on the committee my district takes a hit under this reform bill but sometimes it takes a group of well intentioned individuals that move the cause of reform forward and that's what we're trying to do tonight members will record their vote by electronic device this is a 15-minute vote I took up the cause and the fight for this farm bill because I think it's important this is about support for family farms and giving them a fair shake but it's also a fight over the course of future agriculture how are we going to manage the lands what type of food products are we going to produce it's a fight worth having because there's a lot at stake and in writing on the outcome of it but it's a fight that can't be waged alone yeah it can only be won through the help in the interest of the country as a whole and the American people a lot of checks and balances built into the system but it doesn't mean you can't come to work prepared every day and you can't fight hard for the principles and the values that you believe in I think the future of reform in the farm bill has never been stronger and as more people get more informed I think this is going to become a more powerful political message to convince my colleagues in Congress that this is the right thing to do [Music] it's striking how of all those different sixties strands sexual liberation environmentalism civil rights that food is one of the more vital ones today I don't think the others have gone away I think they've been folded into everyday life and you could argue food was just a little later to achieve that kind of prominence the locally-grown food movement is about several things it's about getting better food and fresher food and not having thousands of miles of transportation involved but it's also about community it's also about the kind of community that you want to live in I like the idea of knowing the people who are growing my food and I love the idea that I can go and visit the farm and see it myself I think it's beyond just telling people to eat organic now it's about who's growing your food you know are they part of your community are they invested in the health of the community and how can we get communities to own their food system it's a way to help transform society social activism does not need to be going out in the middle of the street and banging on the drum social activism can be making a good meal organic agriculture was built with absolutely no help from the government no help from any institutions there's really consumers and farmers working together you know making that bridge themselves what we've come to now is a recognition of responsibility that's a delicious future good food touches everyone it's our common language everyone eats on this planet and if we all ate with pleasure and intention we could really change the world you can make a difference in this world of wild food by being more demanding you go to your local supermarket you look through your local restaurant and don't be worried demand the best contact your representatives offices both the house in the center tell a friend build your backyard into a seasonal garden and keep away from big businesses not a chain grocery stores you can support your local farmers and by coming here regularly it's the easiest thing and it will be the best thing for you that's it that's all you really need to do we have power here and we don't have to go anywhere we just have to like vote with our Forks we get three votes a day they don't all have to be perfect but if one of them if one of them a day is done in consciousness with an eye toward the land the farm or the animal we will have done something important we do have choices not just about what we're gonna have for dinner tonight but how our country feeds itself so what are you waiting for help yourself all right so do this one really good piece of dirt I mean can you do something in like 30 seconds can you sense a piece of dirt and 30 seconds Oh give it to me in 10 seconds I gotta go quick like the time cranked up on put his hand down the back of my pants [Music] you say that everything I'm saying controversial stuff the best one I heard was someone call me the Friendly Fuhrer well that's the way it works I mean you just you know just a chef is a little bit of step driver we're cheaper than if you eat at the West Beach stop it you know it's not funny anymore yeah I feel it doesn't in my tenure there started a tripe revolution actually you know if I were to do it again I'd be shocked Cousteau we're live at the airport there's nothing to say because we can't but I also like beef dude I mean I I mean look at the size of me I eat well Hamburger Helper was big when I was growing up but my mother also also cooked very well as well when one of their writers with a humorous tone wrote that we were for the farmers market was the flea market where fruits and nuts or vegetables the first thing we ever made for my dad was a spam roast and so I think when he got after the spam roast he's like here's a book for you the great reason to live in Berkeley is because the quality of life is kind of controlled by people who have a great deal of liberal guilt one of the carpenters was working and he said you can open a bakery Berkeley's got bakeries already why don't you open a hotdog stand what we really need is a hotdog stand I remember thinking oh my god have we screwed up I remember he worked in two shifts we would have not the sex the drugs you know when things got really really going strong then they start getting the tank of nitrous oxide a wild free-for-all biggest party of all time you can go out and get sex for five dollars and five minutes later is over making love you take your time yeah see she agrees already she said yeah I talk like I can't help Steny Hoyer said it best this morning so when the president submitted is a budget request to Congress earlier this year we just didn't know he did it on tablets instead of paper that ties it all together now I just have to say it like Meryl Streep eating our great pages of the profound experience profound eating experience oh my god the combination of of like tart sweet and then all of those layers of flavor and the texture the juice dripping down are you getting hungry now [Music] [Music]

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 1,410,090

Rating: 4.7409573 out of 5

Keywords: real stories, documentary food industry corporations, agricultural policy us, documentary food industry, documentaries food industry, Alice Waters, organic food movement, agricultural policy, food culture us, us food culture, documentary food culture, food culture documentary, How Corporations Ruined Food, organic food movement documentary, documentary organic food movement, documentaries

Id: 5RwIWGkMxrE

Length: 71min 46sec (4306 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/MonsieurMcGregor]

This film is called Food Fight and is from 2008, not 2017. This information is in the video itself. Please try to use the correct information in your titles.