Fresh by Ana Sofia Joanes (2009): inconvenient truths in the pudding.

The filmic narrative of Fresh, punctuated by interviews with author Michael Pollan, delivers a carefully crafted didactic message: the industrial agro-business as we know it, replete as it is with noxious pesticides, animal concentration camps, monocultures that exhaust vast expanses of land, is an unsustainable paradox. While it aims at feeding us all at a low price, it depletes the land and poisons us with mutated strains of various bacteria. Want to see a documentary on food presenting a rational, documented, scientific demonstration of the ills, indeed lethal dangers, posed by the agro-industrial complex, and a plea for organic, healthy and sustainable farming? Another Future of Food (Deborah Koons Garcia, 2004), World According to Monsanto (Marie-Monique Robin, 2008),  Food Inc. (Robert Kenner, 2009)? Put this way, the invitation sounds as thrilling as one to a Tupperware meeting, unless you belong to the choir of slow food aficionados and other locovores.

How to visually convey the message without an Al Gore type lecture format? Valery Lyman’s photography of the omnivore’s dilemma is stunning. The camera pans on packed multitudes of panic-stricken chicks and nervous-looking hogs that never see the light of day. The nervousness reappears, surprisingly, in the uneasy hands of an interviewed farming wife, and in the vacant stare of her husband, both cogs in the corporate agricultural machine. A familiar Hitchcock-like shot of a crop-spraying plane comes back to haunt the film, highlighting a danger much more lethal than the one in North by Northwest. Clearly, we are doomed, as we undergo several levels of alienation: from our food source, from our communities, from our environment. Hence the rapidly paced montage of prepackaged food, whose true color and texture we cannot visually apprehend, either because they are masked by plastic wrap, or because they disappear altogether from view, beneath the staged photographs labeling the frozen packages.

The problems are as clearly presented as the many convincing solutions, including Growing Power’s urban farming. Will Allen, the farm’s director, guides us through a no nonsense masterful introduction to growing our own food on a small 3 acre parcel in Milwaukee, WI. Sprinkled with encouragements for all his visitors to replicate, at home, what they see on his diminutive farm, his flowing presentation details the intricacies of food production. It is also a humbling homage to every single participant of the process during which Allen repeats his love and respect for every contributor to the production of his food, from the microscopic organisms to the worms whose castings he reveres. Allen tells the story of good, nutritious food with arguments of formidable simplicity.

But then, remember the appetizing, deliciously promising title of the film. The rapid succession of the abundance of cheap, unreal food ends up giving way to lingering shots on stunning peaches on the stands of farmers’ markets, and coops. Later in the film, close ups on the ripe, glisteningly red flesh of fresh watermelon alternate with pictures of pork chops produced by sustainable, fair priced farms and plants. Food is visible, the humus of the garden touched by hands eager to get dirty in it.

The camera lingers on bucolic rural landscapes. Joel Salatin’s cows and poultry are happily chewing or pecking away in the fields. Even Joel’s family eats colorful and plentiful dishes around a long table set outside. The pleasure of a succulent shared meal shows in the framed faces of diners, young and old, laughing and smiling. The photography here exudes a strong whiff of nostalgia: this is the way to reconnect to food, to the work of it, and the pleasure of it. It taps into childhood memories of meals outside at grandma’s and grandpa’s place in the country. The viewer can almost taste it, feel the sun declining in the sky, and smell the grass that feeds the cows. In the end, it is the promise of fresh produce that stays on and delights the viewer.

So, once again: want to go see an important, well made film titled Fresh?

Co-authors: Flo and Fredo Martin

Tags: Movie Review