Among all the other revelations during the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, one of the most startling was the pandemic’s effect on the food supply and distribution system. In the United States, food availability had been taken for granted. Grocery stores were full; restaurants could order what they needed; farmers could get their produce to market. But the pandemic showed how the system was vulnerable and even broken.
Director Laura Gabbert is a documentary filmmaker best known for her profile of an L.A. food critic, City of Gold, and her eco-documentary about a New York family trying to reduce their carbon imprint, No Impact Man. For Food and Country, she teamed up with Ruth Reichl, a food writer and former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Gourmet magazine. Connecting mostly virtually, Ruth reached out to independent farmers, ranchers, and even a kelp harvester. She talked to restaurant operators, chefs, bakers, and entrepreneurs – all in an effort to gauge the impact of the pandemic. Some report on the situation in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Other explain what is happening in the plains states and other agricultural areas. The picture, to say the least, is not pretty.
There are some interesting stories here as Reichl’s subjects not only share what they are experiencing but also speculate on how food can be better delivered. Alice Waters, the farm-to-food innovator with a famous restaurant in San Francisco, bemoans the sudden collapse of the restaurant culture in the city. Chefs Reem Assil and Minh Phan struggle to keep their establishments open and to keep their staff employed.
Meanwhile, food suppliers must adapt to the loss of restaurant business, and the reality of quantities of food going to waste. Their work was always risky, since the country shifted to the factory model of farming. We learn that only 7% of farmers make a living from their work. Reichl talks to cattle rancher Steve Stratford in Kansas, who has some strong opinions about what’s wrong with consolidation in the meat industry. In the Bronx, Karen Washington is establishing community education programs through her Rise and Root Farms; she laments the lack of a sustainable and equitable food system. At White Oak Pastures in Georgia, Will Harris gives priority to his animals’ welfare and their being able to express their instinctive behaviors.
Lee and Bob Jones run Chef’s Garden Farms in Huron, Ohio, which supplies fresh produce to restaurants. They almost went out of business when their clients had to close down, and they did have to lay off people. Lee put his finger on the problem:
“We have several million people in New York City alone who are going to bed hungry, and here we are just a handful of hours down the road, but the product is in the field. There are 120 families here we don’t know how to keep on the payroll. We’re not smart enough as a society to work together to connect those dots.”
This documentary shows how important it is to connect the dots between food producers and food consumers. Hopefully, it will inspire people to investigate how the broken food system affects their communities so they can do something about it.
“A healthy farm culture can be based only upon familiarity and can grow only among a people soundly established upon the land. It nourishes and safeguards a human intelligence of the earth that no amount of technology can satisfactorily replace. The growth of such a culture was once a strong possibility in the farm communities of this country. We now have only the sad remnants of those communities. If we allow another generation to pass without doing what is necessary to enhance and embolden the possibilities now perishing with them, we will lose it altogether.”
— Wendell Berry in The Unsettling of America (1977)