By Helen Klein
Do you know where the food you eat comes from? That was the question that Brooklyn husband-and-wife filmmakers Lilach Dekel and Rod Bachar set out to answer, when they took to the road, across the U.S., with their two-year-old daughter in tow. The result is a documentary film, EAT INDUSTRY: One family’s Road Trip through the American Food System, which sheds light on the way food is produced in this country, featuring both small family farms and large agribusinesses which have dramatically altered the landscape as well as the way most Americans eat. Their young child, said Dekel, was the impetus behind the couple’s voyage of discovery. “We started to think about what we were going to feed her and what we were feeding ourselves,” she noted That period of reflection included reading such books as Fast Food Nation. “It seemed like science fiction,” Dekel remarked. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading.” The subject so interested the couple, Dekel added, that they decided to make a film. They started at the Park Slope Food Co-op, where they were members, but it wasn’t long, said Dekel, before they, “Realized the Park Slope Food Co-op was this little bubble in the middle of Brooklyn. It didn’t really represent the food system. That was when we had the idea to go on a road trip through America, to see the good, the bad and the ugly of our food system, and how our food choices impact the environment and our health.” The couple’s five-month, 16,000-mile journey, which is documented in the film, included stops at a range of different food production venues. It is made, stressed Dekel, “From one family’s point of view, so the film is not just an investigation of the food system with a lot of scary numbers and statistics, but how we experienced the food system on the road.” Among the filmmakers’ stops was a family farm in Kentucky, whose owners, according to Dekel, reaped a total annual income of $16,000 for the 100-hour weeks of work they put in. They lived in a makeshift home, without running water, said Dekel, putting everything back into the farm because of their commitment to growing healthful produce. This, said Dekel, is distributed through a CSA (community supported agriculture), in which families commit to purchase, in advance, a portion of the farm’s bounty over the course of a year, to cover the cost of running the farm as well as the farmer’s salary. “They’re definitely under the poverty line,” she stressed, “with two children, and they’re feeding 50 families.” In southern Idaho, Dekel and Bachar viewed the diametrical opposite of the Kentucky farm – a dairy agribusiness with 100,000 cows crammed into an area way too small for them. Rather than benefiting the land, this arrangement, said Dekel, depletes it – poisoning it because of the concentrated amount of feces that has polluted the water — and causing both home values and the quality of life for those who lived there previously to plummet. “When you concentrate animals, it’s not good for people,” Dekel said. “It’s also not good for animals. They get sick so they start pumping them with hormones, and the hormones go into the milk, and we get them when we drink the milk. “There are more cows than people in Idaho,” Dekel remarked, explaining that the surge in mega-dairies in the state was a result of its lack of regulation, which drew large dairy farming operations from California after that state increased its regulations of the industry. To film the giant dairy operation, the filmmakers took to the air, but that was a challenge in itself. Four pilots, said Dekel, declined to fly them, because they were afraid they would lose business from the large dairy farms that used their services. They finally were taken aloft by a retired professor who had his own plane and who, said Dekel, “Thought it was important to show what dairies have done to this part of Idaho. When you see a 100,000 cow operation from the air, and see its magnitude, you realize that it’s totally wrong.” And, yet, it’s not at all obvious to consumers that the milk they are buying may come from such an operation. “When we buy a carton of milk, we don’t see that,” Dekel noted. “We see a cow in a pasture.” After observing the large and the small, the good and the bad of the American food production system, Dekel said that, after all, there are no easy answers. “Consumers need to start taking responsibility for their food choices,” she remarked. However, she added, it’s not as simple as “buying organic carrots. “Our whole message is, just start questioning, because it’s so basic – it’s food. We all have to eat it. Once you ask the questions, you can make choices. It’s not like we buy everything organic or don’t eat fast food. We do, but we do it with open eyes.” The filming was done in 2004. The couple is now editing the film, “and fundraising as we go,” said Dekel. The latest round will kick off with an evening at The Farm on Adderly, 1108 Cortelyou Road, on January 24th from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Tickets are $15 before January 17th, $20 at the door, and can be bought on line (through the film production website, www. transformationfilms.com) or at the restaurant. The event will include locally-sourced food, organic wine, and a screening, photo exhibit and a post-screening discussion.
