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"A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food" - My Most Recent Article on MediaRights.org

By Shira | Sep 24, 09 04:15 PM

Check out my new article on food documentaries. It's kind of a survey/opinion piece and I'd love to know what you think!

Read the full article:
A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food

Here's an excerpt:

These days it seems like green is the new black. From designer grocery bags to eco-tourism, popular culture has finally embraced environmentalism and, for better or worse, begun coopting it with profit-driven campaigns. Regardless of how you feel about capitalism, the good news for mother earth is that changing your daily habits to lower your impact is no longer wholly dismissed as radical, hippy behavior, at least not by people in blue states. Core to this cultural paradigm shift is food. Americans are making the not-so-giant-leap in logic that what we eat affects our health and the health of our planet, and documentary films have played a significant role in getting us here.

In 1976 Americans were reeling from the Vietnam War and Watergate. The utopian visions of the sixties were fading memories and food was already firmly established in the collective psyche as a “product” – fast, cheap and out of control. It was in this context that filmmaker Frederick Wiseman released Meat, a cinema verité portrait of what was, at the time, one of the country’s largest slaughterhouses. Years before animal rights activists were capturing the disturbing conditions at factory farms with hidden camcorders, Wiseman invited Americans to meet their meat through his nuanced filmmaking. (Read more)

And, the article got a mention on Ithaca's Food Web, a new blog about local food - thanks Alison!

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