Hot Docs 2023: Food and Country

Director Laura Gabbert’s Food and Country offers a wide-ranging look at the ongoing crisis in American food production. The film follows food writer and former restaurant critic for both the Los Angeles and New York Times, Ruth Reichl, as she interviews people at all levels of the food production chain, from farmers to restaurant-operators, ostensibly about the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on food production. The film uses one highly visible crisis to explore aspects of another neglected and long unfolding one. Through its historical approach and the variety of subjects it interviews, Food and Country reveals the relationship between North America’s love of cheap food and a myriad of other socio-political effects.

The film begins with Ruth Reichl setting up interviews with her subjects just as large swathes of America go into lockdown in March 2020. The pandemic frames and acts as the impetus to investigate just how far the ripple effect of closing restaurants went, stretching back to the farmers who then had nowhere to sell their produce. The result, as one interviewee points out, was Americans throwing out enough food in early 2020 to feed many other whole countries. While the web of linkages that caused this isn’t always immediately apparent, the causes of such a precarious situation aren’t hard to explain.

It ultimately comes down to the fact that, proportionally, North Americans pay far, far less for food than anyone else in the world. And cheap food doesn’t just come out of nowhere. An entire chain of operations, from the migrant labour that makes farm work affordable to the system that allows tipped labourers to be paid less than minimum wage, makes it possible. As Reichl emphasizes: cheap is only possible because there is exploitation happening at some point in the chain.

One of the film’s best elements is that Gabbert and Reichl interview a variety of people who contribute to the food system, showing how the policies that have led to the food crisis since World War II impact people from all walks of life. One interviewee, an independent rancher in Kansas, Steve Stratford, offers a portrait of how the policies of American agri-business do little to help people who work in the industry. Only four meat packing companies own nearly all the slaughter houses and packing in America. Steve explains how shutdowns during COVID drove the cost of beef up, but those costs were never passed along to small ranchers who couldn’t get their cattle to market. Steve explains how what is often seen as a free-market capitalist system is actually against free business and how he wishes the government would put stricter constraints on enforcing a level-playing field.

Another interviewee looks at how the ownership of farms has shifted dramatically away from Black farmers in the last 70 years, with the percentage of Black owned and operated farms dropping dramatically. The result is that Black communities are alienated from food production. One interviewee, Karen Washington, co-owner and operator of Rise & Roots Farms in New York, speaks of how she wants to help Black communities get back in touch with farms and food.

I appreciated the film’s historical focus, and how it notes that many of the problems in the food system are a result of specific political policies. Many of these policies were passed in the post-war era, when the US government put an emphasis on convenience and low-cost as part of America’s Cold War strategy of competition with the USSR in the 50s and 60s. However, we now live in the wake of those policies, and also with the priorities they ingrained in North American culture around what we can expect of food.

Reichl also offers a portrait of her own history as a child of post-war German immigrants in New York, to moving to an intentional community in 60s California and then rising to become a food critic for some of America’s biggest newspapers. Ultimately, she wanted to be more than just someone who advised rich people where to eat, but wanted to shine a light on how restaurants and food form the backbones of communities.

The film does end on a typically hopeful note that documentaries of this kind are prone to. That is, when documentaries present frightening facts about our society that we may not be aware of as their focus, there’s often a pressure to find a silver lining. Food and Country is no different, finding hope in people who are farming in innovative and more traditional ways. For instance, in speaking with Will Harris of White Oaks Pastures and Bren Smith, who has pioneered work in ocean farming kelp, the film suggests an answer is not in solutions through expansion but rather replication. Each community needs to have their own networks so that when another crisis arises, whether natural or man-made, they are not left as reliant on precarious chains of food production. The film is definitely more reactive, looking at how the food industry has responded to COVID, rather than criticizing specific policies around the pandemic that forced farmers and restaurateurs into such a hard spot. But it’s a minor critique that is more about choice of focus than what we do get, which ultimately is very informative, if broad.

Thankfully, the framing device of Ruth Reichl’s journey and relationships she builds with her interviewees carries the film through. Sometimes, during online interviews the film goes to a shot of the interviewee from the side and we can see Ruth on the screen; given the focus on COVID safety,  I frequently wondered who was filming these scenes, as cameras were not visible behind the interviewee in the reverse shots. It suggests a bit of staging and takes away from the immediacy.  However, the film is solidly if conventionally structured, with talking heads and lots of coverage, intermixed with historical and news footage. It’s not formally groundbreaking, but it does break the ground into understanding the food chain, agribusiness, and how the crisis of our food supply in North America impacts us all in ways far beyond those we can imagine.

7 out of 10

Food and Country (2023, USA)

Directed by Laura Gabbert; featuring Ruth Reichl.

Related Posts