The Incredible Cycling Garden Women

Picture three young women getting on their bicycles and pedaling from the District of Columbia to Montreal and back to visit urban food gardens and other young people caught up in the movement to take back our agriculture.

They call themselves Women's Garden Cycles--Liz Tylander, Kat Schiffler, Lara Sheets--and we are only too lucky that they took a video camera and some sound equipment on their bicycle adventure because they have turned a farming travelogue into an extraordinary film about local food. Last night they drew upwards of 100 like-minded and youthful gardeners to the Letelier Theater in Georgetown for a rousing screening of their bicycle epic, complete with free Maryland beer, peanuts out of Mason jars and hand-crafted pizza.

Having spent several months in a bicycle seat at one point in another lifetime, I was immediately in love with the idea of this incredible adventure. I wanted to go, too. The genius of their idea was to drop in on community gardens and small farm operations along their route to take the pulse of this unfolding revolution in food production, the movement away from toxic industrial agriculture toward an embrace of sustainable, earth-friendly, community-minded farming.

Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Boston, Vermont, Montreal--wherever you look there are people of every hue and ethnic background with their hands in the soil, using every possible means to bring forth a bounty of healthful fruits and vegetables to share with neighbors. There are long rows of broccoli in the country, tomatoes climbing out of plastic buckets in the city. There are tumble-down sheds turned into milking barns and urban rooftops transformed into tangles of squashes and peppers and eggplants.

Bill McKibben, author, teacher and local food advocate, makes a prominent appearance in the film. McKibben notes that certain young people, after spending a small fortune on a college education, are seeking nothing more than a few acres on which to grow vegetables and raise a few goats. Parents may not approve, but this generation is ready to forego the enticements of our consumer culture in order to grasp a transformative moment.

These are the new American farmers, and against their enthusiasm--their eagerness to recapture a sense of self-reliance, stewardship and community-- the old agriculture--with its polluting methods, unhealthy products and de-humanizing corporate culture--truly looks like a sad relic from another time.

Perhaps the best news is that the movement has taken root in the nation's capitol as well. We are seeing more farmers bringing their produce to market. New farmers markets are sprouting all the time. And efforts like the 7th Street Garden--where young, dynamic urban farmers link up with a neighborhood to raise wholesome, chemical-free vegetables--are showing us what is possible, the way forward. Last night's crowd--full of energy, determination and muscle--looked for all the world like the vanguard of a new era.

It's a very exciting time to be a gardener.

King Corn: Or How Earl Butz Changed the Way Americans Eat

How does corn grown in Iowa get into the structure of a hair follicle belonging to a guy from Massachussetts?

That is the question that drives two friends--linked by a common Midwestern ancestry--to move to Iowa for a year and plant an acre of corn to see how this ancient crop came to dominate the American diet of the 21st Century.

The result is a romp of a documentary called King Corn that opened here in the District of Columbia last night, a film that manages to charm as well as ask some profound questions about how this country feeds itself.

What eventually emerges from this lighthearted buddy film, however, is a tragic lesson in how a few well-placed individuals--in this case the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Earl Butz, working with a supportive president, Richard Nixon, and profit-hungry corporate interests--can alter the life and health of an entire nation in lasting ways. It was Butz, himself raised on a family farm, who flipped the federal system of farm supports on its ear with the specific intention of flooding the country with cheap food.

In this film, you will actually see Butz, now frail and confined to a nursing home, defending decisions that turned Americans into lab rats for corporate agri-business. Butz sees cheap food as a driver of American wealth, but we are now witnessing the true costs of his master plan: a national epidemic of obesity, sky-rocketing health care bills, a generation that most likely will be the first with a shorter life expectancy than its parents'.

After moving to the small Iowa town of Greene, our film-making duo, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, quickly discover a landscape awash in corn. That's because the federal system Butz devised no longer pays farmers to refrain from overproducing--a system that kept crop prices high in the past--but now actually subsidizes the growing of huge surpluses.

The resulting tsunami of cheap corn becomes an essential ingredient in every fast food joint, in virtually every processed food product on grocery shelves, in the feed of industrially produced poultry, pork and cattle. Laboratory analysis of a human hair snippet shows that the carbon in the body of an average American is, in fact, mainly corn-based. As food author Michael Pollan confirms in the film, nearly everything in the typical American diet revolves around cheap corn.

"We are not growing quality here," declares one Iowa corn farmer. "We're growing crap!"

In fact, the corn grown on most Iowan farms is not edible--not by humans, anyway. The American legacy of diverse, self-sufficient family farming has been tossed in the dust bin. Farms are becoming bigger and bigger, more and more industrial, more and more obsessed with a single crop, and more and more dependent on government stipends. Family farmsteads are plowed under as consolidation swallows up generations worth of agrarian tradition. Our connection to the land has been severed.

The name of the game now is 1,000 acres, a big tractor, genetically-engineered seeds and a tank of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer parked at the end of the rows. Once the seeds are planted, it's just a matter of watching the corn grow, spraying occasionally with pesticides and herbicides, then driving truckloads of corn to the local grain elevator--usually overflowing with grain well before the season is over.

Cheney and Ellis try mightily to get a tour of a high fructose corn syrup plant but are rebuffed. Instead, they get an earful from an industry spokesman, who describes how much tastier food is when treated with HFC. We see tanker trains filled with empty calories, destined for eager bellies on all four compass points.

In tracing the path of corn products outward from Iowa and across the country, we meet a cab driver in Brooklyn who has dropped 100 pounds since he stopped drinking sodas based on corn syrup. He recounts how his father lost his legs to diabetes before dying, how his mother, his sister and he himself all suffer from the disease.

In the end, we are left chuckling as Cheney and Ellis return to their acre the following spring and plant grass, a small act of defiance against the corn juggernaut. But we know that while corn has been very, very good for corporate agri-business, the country is saddled with a huge corn conundrum.

Saturday Food Film Fest

Make yourself a bowl of popcorn. Put your feet up and relax. No heavy lifting in the kitchen today. We're just going to sit back and take in a few flics.

Amazing, the stuff that's making the rounds on video these days, no? Take, for instance, this surreal orchestra from Austria, a symphony of vegetables, really. A trip to the local produce market, some quick work with an electrical drill, a saw, and--voila!--carrots, peppers, eggplants, all making music together.

Not merely entertaining, but completely mesmerizing. And wait! There's more. There's actually a vegetable orchestra Take 2. Be sure not to miss it. And thanks to Rob for tipping us off...

******

On a more sober note, John Bowe has written an eye-opener of a book--Nobodies--on the existence of a kind of slave labor in U.S. fruit and vegetable production. Workers who speak no English and are fearful of rocking the boat often live at the complete mercy of agricultural bosses and overlords. They languish in squalid camps with nowhere else to go. And Bowe shows just how critical they are to the food chain that includes Tropicana, Minute Maid, McDonald's and Taco Bell.

Can this really be happening here? Now? Should consumers feel the least bit concerned?

Bowe appeared recently on Comedy Central for an interview with John Stewart, and you can watch it all here at the Eating Liberally blog, where you can also read an excellent review of the book...

*****

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. In making the documentary King Corn, two guys set out to see where all that corn goes. Turns out, corn is in just about everything we eat. It's helping to make Americans fatter and fatter, and we subsidize the entire business with our tax dollars, helping to make bad food really affordable. But now we're turning it into fuel for automobiles, ratcheting up the price of everyone's grocery bill.

"We're not growing quality," grouses one corn farmer. "We're growing crap!" Like most farmers, he doesn't even eat his own crops.

You can watch the trailer, as well as five short but amusing clips from the film...

*****

If you like watching things blow up, you'll love these films of Portland Gas & Electric actually dynamiting Marmot Dam on Oregon's Sandy River in order to make life livable for the local salmon. You'll see a power company executive actually push the plunger that ignites the explosion. The only thing missing is some reaction from the salmon...

Speaking of salmon, don't miss this funky aquarium scene where the fish are groovin' on hip-hop and flying to the moon...

*****

Finally, someone had the genius idea to put a camera in the hands of actual school children and let them explain why we need to get junk food out of our schools. And just where did these kids get their film-making chops? Their stuff is most excellent.

They're joined by comedian Chevy Chase and Jared the "Subway guy" urging Congress to do something to improve school nutrition...