The documentary film Forks Over Knives starts in the middle of a health crisis. In a video montage, statistics on heart disease, obesity rates, prescription drug use, and the cost of healthcare are interspersed with sound bites from the likes of Bill Maher, who declares, “the answer is spinach!” While the tone is dark, Maher’s prelude stands for the hope within this film. Forks Over Knives compels us to consider that spinach is in fact an antidote to our disease of affluence. Award-winning documentary filmmaker and Forks Over Knives’ writer, director, and narrator Lee Fulkerson leads us on a sight-seeing tour through the American health crisis. At every turn we learn that processed foods and animal proteins are making us ill–and we learn that cooking and eating whole, plant-based foods can not only prevent these illnesses but often can even reverse them. Fulkerson consults with physicians Matthew Lederman, M.D. and Alona Pulde, M.D. to tackle his own health issues. Though in seemingly fair health, Fulkerson lives on Red Bull and shows a few warning signs of future heart issues. He undertakes the Lederman/Pulde treatment–a regimen of wholesome vegetarian cooking–and watches his waistline diminish, his energy surge, and his cardiovascular numbers improve.

Meanwhile, Fulkerson talks with another patient of Lederman and Pulde, as well as several other health experts and a diverse group of ordinary people who have changed their diets and radically changed their health as a result. Much of the film focuses on two researchers who, through the culmination of years of study, have each reached similar conclusions about nutrition. Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr. was a surgeon whose treatment of diseases led him to investigate how a vegan diet could prevent and reverse the disorders, especially coronary artery disease. For 20 years he subjected the patients in his study to a strict whole-foods, plant-based diet. Participants in this study talk about how the diet reversed the severe illnesses (heart disease, diabetes, cancer) they had faced.

The second researcher is Dr. T. Colin Campbell, a nutrition scientist and author of The China Study. His study of health and nutrition is touted as the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition in history. Campbell conducted a survey of lifestyle and diseases in rural China and Taiwan, searching for correlation between the two. The most significant finding is the association between animal-based foods and chronic illnesses. Campbell’s study doesn’t just pinpoint the usual suspects (cholesterol and saturated fats); he also concludes that animal proteins have a harmful effect on our health. The answer, again, is to adopt a whole-foods, plant-based diet. All the protein we need can be found through vegetables.

I think most nutritionists would agree with a whole-foods diet–certainly one that consists of mostly plants. But some health experts are skeptical of the conclusions Campbell reaches about the connection between animal protein and chronic illnesses. Denise Minger posted a thorough review of The China Study on her blog, as well as a more formal analysis and exchange with Campbell. Marion Nestle reports that “mainstream scientists find some of [Campbell’s] arguments credible (fruits and vegetables) but not his more extreme ones. The scientific arguments are complicated but nothing in nutrition and chronic disease ever boils down to one good or bad nutrient.” Throughout the film we hear people talk about taking control of their health and their lives. This leads me to wonder, has veganism become a belief system that enables people to feel like they can exert control over the capriciousness of life, disease, even death?

Striking a balance is a notion that nutritionist and frequent Civil Eats contributor Kristin Wartman discusses in her research on traditional cultures’ diets. With few exceptions, most cultures around the globe have lived on a diet that is 70 to 80 percent based on plant-based foods. She disagrees with Campbell’s ideas about the harmfulness of animal proteins: “we are talking about moderation–the amount of animal protein most Americans eat is not moderate!  A primarily plant-based diet with a moderate amount of good, clean animal products is ideal.” Esselstyn acknowledges that his recommended diet is an extreme one; but he adds that it’s in proportion to the extreme diseases Americans face. I wonder if Campbell and Esselstyn’s veganism is an extreme diet for extreme people–precisely because we no longer know what moderation looks like or how to live it.

The audience at the screening I attended was drawn largely from a university student group and, judging by the “blech!” noises I heard every time the stock footage of grilled meats appeared, it was a largely vegan audience at that. (Sorry, Fulkerson, for me those meat shots missed their mark and instead prompted Pavlovian drool as I recalled the smells of barbecue.) Given the emphasis on personal choices, with just a passing glance at how socioeconomic inequality affects access to healthful food, this is clearly a film for middle-income people in poor health but with the kinds of resources that will enable them to make radical changes in their diets–and stick with those changes.

But for every story of lifestyle change and disease reversal, there is also a story of enduring support, whether from physicians or, in the case of a Texas fireman on a “plant-strong diet,” from a small community. The film’s final scene–a tasty-looking pot luck held for the participants of Esselstyn’s study and Drs. Campbell, Lederman, Pulde’s patients–provides an uplifting ending. One hopes that the lessons of the film can truly impact people from all communities and economic backgrounds. For that to happen, we must strike a balance between personal success stories and compelling research, and universal access to healthy resources for all.

Photo: Forks Over Knives

As the average age of farmers in the U.S. continues to raise, young farmers are beginning to sprout up across the nation. The recent documentary GROW!, directed by Christine Anthony and Owen Masterson, showcases the resurgence of young organic farmers in the state of Georgia. The film highlights 20 individuals across 12 farms who have found their way back to the land, whether working on a family-owned farm, buying their own, or, in most cases, using another farmer’s land to grow food for their community.

GROW! is a story that does not seek to convince the moviegoer of any particular viewpoint, but instead offers the opportunity to understand a new generation of farmer and why they seek to live a lifestyle removed from the hustle and bustle of the corporate world. “It’s a beautiful story and we wanted these young farmers to tell it in their own words; no narrator, no scientific experts, no hand wringing gloom and doom, just an honest, on the ground account of a movement taking place at this very moment in time,” said directors Anthony and Masterson.

While we might be tempted to write their farming endeavors off as young, idealistic attempts at a simple life that simply no longer exists, what we get is a picture of hardworking, passionate and, yes, idealistic 20 and 30-somethings who feel called to a “real” job with tangible results. Not least of their reasons for becoming farmers is a desire to fight injustice and create a healthier, more sustainable world by growing “clean, fair food.” Being self-employed has its perks too.

Far from the back-to-the-land movement of the 60s and 70s where, as Anthony and Masterson suggested, individuals were mainly concerned with dropping out of society and being self-sufficient, the young farmers of today are “fully engaged and participating in all aspects of society.”

“After the excesses of the 80′s and 90′s there is a sea change of values. A lot of young people no longer are drawn to earning a bunch of money working hard for somebody else in an unrewarding career.”

Add to this the fact that many young people are graduating college to find there are no jobs in their chosen career field, whether it be in accounting, chemistry or medicine, like some of the farmers in the film. But there are deeper reasons for becoming a farmer. “A lot of people of this generation want to work towards changing this world for the better, be it the environment or simply improving things in their local communities.”

As Rebecca Williams of Manyfold farm put it, “I got into farming because I like the idea of feeding people, and I like the idea of feeding people stuff that’s good for them, that makes them feel good, that makes their days better, that’s pleasurable and nourishing.”

The directors hope the film will inspire more would-be farmers and retired land owners to find each other and continue a legacy of small, organic farming, while working to change laws in support of small, sustainable farmers. They also hope it will encourage viewers to think about where their food comes. But viewers should also be prepared to leave with a desire to do more. As one moviegoer stated, “[it] makes me want to quit my job and become a farmer.”

To schedule a local screening of GROW! for your community or classroom, contact the filmmakers through the film’s Web site.

I was skeptical and sighing heavily when I pressed play to view Fat, Sick, & Nearly Dead. I immediately thought, “With such a negative title, this documentary will be a) depressing and b) preachy.”

I’m an optimistic person though–hence my dislike for the title–so I tried to toss out the judgmental thoughts and, as it turns out, my initial impression was pleasantly proven wrong.

The premise of the story is that Joe Cross, an affluent Australian businessman and director of the film, armed himself with a juicer and a video camera to wage a war against his weight in America. Predictably, Joe loses 100 pounds after a 60 day juice fast and eradicates his autoimmune disease that manifests itself as an annoying rash. (Admittedly, I scoffed at his complaining about taking a few pills a day while I watch my husband give himself six insulin shots daily along with a cocktail of pills, but, really, a disease is a disease whether a rash or a failed pancreas.) If this was the end of the film, I would think it was an indirect infomercial for a new line of juices.

But this is where the film takes a direction that is refreshing, especially after watching Jamie Oliver’s come-to-America-and-revolutionize-the-food-system, community-placed approach.

Joe has a genuine, gregarious, non-condescending manner that allows his conversations with the diversity that is America unwrap raw truths of the trajectory of our food culture. From a family that proudly only eats a home cooked meal a few times a month to a father who shrugs off dying early in front of his son even when he could change course with better eating habits, our convenience-based eating habits are exposed.

Then Phil comes along, a story one gets all too used to after shows such as the Biggest Loser. By befriending Phil, a random trucker with the same rare condition as Joe and who is severely obese, the film demonstrates how a helping hand and a healthy relationship with food can give you a life back.

And that is what the film’s mission is to do, I learned, with a campaign called “Reboot.” As the film unrolls across screens this spring, the Reboot team is partnering with the National Good Food Network to help build the supply channels to meet the increased demand for fresh fruits and vegetables this film will seed.

As a beginning farmer and advocate for local food systems, I cannot help but love the demand this film can create for local produce growers, but in the film there is no rally cry to local, sustainable or organic food, it’s just simply increased fruit and vegetable consumption. The film’s singular focus may attract more viewers, but it’s a missed opportunity to not touch upon the built environment, i.e., how many fast food chains were in close proximity to Phil’s home compared to the grocery store or farmers’ market? Why was the day’s worth of juice ingredients more expensive from the local co-op versus the big box store? Maybe Reboot as a campaign will delve more deeply into the issues the film skimmed over.

So even though I still don’t like the title, I recommend watching the film to witness how the simple act of consuming more fruits and vegetables can, in fact, reboot your life.

You can watch the trailer here:

Photo by Daniel Marracino

A new compelling documentary tells the complicated story of the federal school lunch program, its origins, challenges, and opportunities, teasing out nuances without leaving viewers in the weeds. Lunch Line, a film by Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, resists taking sides on this divisive topic even while it deals with vampires and wolves.

Vampires and wolves? Early in the film we meet five Tilden Academy students, black teenagers from a Chicago school where 99.8% of the students qualify for free school lunch. The Tilden crew are traveling to Washington DC, where they will compete in the Cooking Up Change contest and create a winning meal that costs $1.00 per serving, meets USDA nutritional standards, and tastes great. When one of the Tilden teens delivers a breathless analysis of the wolves vs. vampires conflict in the Twilight book and movie series, the filmmakers grab this motif and use it to tell the history of the federal school food program.

Wolves are cast as the social reform-minded liberals while vampires play the agriculture-protecting conservatives in a comic book-style illustrated retelling of school food’s origins. In one of the great bi-partisan compromises of American history, “wolf” Senator Jerry Voorhis meets “vampire” Senator Richard Russell to hammer out the 1946 School Lunch Act. The condition of Dixiecrat Russell’s support was that the program be administered by the USDA, an alliance that has proven both detrimental and advantageous. The national school food program is famous among reformers  for suffering a glut of starchy, processed USDA surplus commodities; yet its alliance with the powerful USDA has given the school food program the political clout needed to survive numerous attacks over six decades.

But what to do about the outdated nutritional standards and the program’s role in the obesity epidemic? Is the USDA just dumping subsidies into the school food program? As current and former USDA officials, school food activists, and others debate, the questions become increasingly complex. Meanwhile, we see the non-profit Organic School Project work miracles, bringing fresh organic foods that meet nutritional standards into Chicago public school cafeterias, only to see the program fold for lack of adequate funding.

Lunch Line reaches a climax at this crisis point: there is simply not enough money going into school food to make significant change. But just as some Chicago schools lose the Organic School Project the city responds to demand and transitions more whole foods-based menus. We learn about the national Farm to School program, a healthful collaboration between agriculture and schools. And as the film reaches a conclusion a familiar theme emerges: we achieve victory, or at least something vaguely approximating it, through unlikely alliances and compromise.

The primary focus of Lunch Line is telling the story of American school food. But if the implicit mission of this film is to spur viewers to action, it’s ambiguous as to where those entry points are. We see mostly government officials, bureaucrats, and activists as the main agents of change; more parent activists–especially parents of color–in the film would have made the film more compelling to the people who have the greatest stake in the school food system. Fortunately, the filmmakers are partnering with food organizations for its national screenings, and those alliances, plus a clever worksheet the filmmakers created, could help parents find those points for engagement.

To request a screening of Lunch Line email lunchlinescreening@gmail.com or send a note through the Lunch Line Facebook page. Watch the trailer at http://www.ujifilms.com/lunchline/

While we’re on the subject of kids, school, and food this week, here’s a shout out for a film I’m going to have to find room for on my top ten food documentaries list.

What’s On Your Plate? features two New York City middle school students, Sadie Rain Hope-Gund and Safiyah Kai Russell Riddle, taking viewers on a food tour that’s as entertaining as it is educational as they set out on a mission to figure out where their meals come from.

The 76-minute film is part of the current Whole Foods Let’s Retake Our Plates film series and has run on Discovery Channel’s Planet Green. Click here for screenings and watch a trailer here.

This doco is directed by veteran social justice film-maker Catherine Gund, mom to one of the budding food activists. The dynamic diet-conscious duo spend a year in front of the camera as they explore their place in the food chain, and ask questions about where the food they eat comes from, how it’s grown, and how far it travels from the farm to their fork.

Pitching this flick to a Hollywood agent you’d sum it up as two urban Nancy Drews meets Food, Inc., as The Atlantic did.

The girl guides talk to friends, family, food activists, farmers, food sellers — and each other — as they investigate issues around health, environment, nutrition, food security, and access. The interviews with politicians and public school food officials are classic. The break beat poet is fresh and funky.

It’s packed with so many teachable moments in bite-sized bits that I suspect it will engage many kids in a conversation about eating. And the tone is matter-of-fact and non-judgmental. We learn Sadie has genetically-linked high cholesterol controlled by diet, and that Safiyah’s family is vegetarian.

On a recent tour of a middle school in my neck of the woods, I saw a sign for a class called “What’s On Your Plate?” and I wonder if it’s based on the film’s 64-page companion curriculum guide on school food, health and access, and local food. (It’s spring break in Berkeley this week, so I can’t confirm).

I hope so. What’s On Your Plate? is a terrific teaching tool, told in the cadence of 11-year-old kids. Pretty savvy and sophisticated multi-racial city kids with deep connections on the food front. But kids nonetheless. Concepts like high fructose corn syrup get equal billing with a popular edible food-like product known as Funyuns.

The film works best when we meet people the tweens find organically. Like the folks who front the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) in their area, the Latino Angel family farmers, who struggle to make a living on the land in upstate New York, and the school dad who had a heart attack that proved a wake-up call for his family’s eating habits.

I was less jazzed to see the typical talking heads of the good food movement. But I’m a somewhat jaded adult and many kids won’t know Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry, both of whom, to be fair, bring important ideas to the table. (For more from Anna Lappé, check out this interview on Civil Eats)

The film ends, fittingly, with a wrap party where food plays a central role. There’s even cute animation and cool music too.

Less scary than Food, Inc., less sensational than Food Revolution, and less sad than both these edible exposes, What’s On Your Plate? does what children have always done best. It offers hope, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.

Who knew you could grow raspberries in a window box in Manhattan?  You can! The kids even help the Angel family organize a CSA to fund the farm. Clearly, the youngest generation of edible entrepreneurs can bring about change in their communities.

A good choice for family movie night, I’m looking forward to watching it with my own 11 year old. I know he’s going to love that school science experiment involving marshmallows, walnuts, and those Funyuns.

Playful, positive, personal, and political without being preachy, What’s On Your Plate? is worth watching. So kudos to the kids and the movie-making mom, who made a wise decision to let the children tell the story.

Photos: Courtesy Aubin Pictures

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

Temple Grandin, the eponymous HBO biopic about the education and early career of the professor, author, and animal behavior expert is, in many ways, also a story about cows. Near the beginning of the film, a 19-year old Grandin is lying in a cow pen surrounded by animals; her face is smudged with manure and she’s grinning wildly. The scene foreshadows Grandin’s lifelong effort to transform the treatment of animals within industrial agriculture and, in the words of Polyface Farm’s Joe Salatin, “let cows express their unique cowness.” Similarly, this scene shows a rare, carefree moment in the life of a high-functioning person with autism, struggling to make a place in the world. The film as a whole attempts to let Grandin express her own “Grandin-ness.”

Temple Grandin moves chronologically with Grandin (played surprisingly well by actress Claire Danes) from her first summer spent on an aunt and uncle’s ranch in the late 1960s – where her close bond and ultimate identification with the cows expands on her nascent interest in their welfare – through college and graduate school, to her early professional years as a researcher, animal welfare advocate and livestock consultant. We see Grandin laughed at, discredited, ignored and harassed. And yet, even in the harsh, male-dominated world of industrial livestock, she finds an entry point, via her heightened visual and auditory sensitivity, into the lives of the animals.

What Danes’ Grandin lacks in traditional social skills, she more than makes up for in perseverance. In one scene she dons men’s clothing (never to take them off again), rolls in mud, and drives an oversized pickup truck to gain entry to a giant Arizona livestock facility she hopes to study. While the handlers and cattlemen around her maintain a familiar emotional and intellectual distance from the animals, we see Grandin crawl through cattle dips, chart the cows’ movement when they’re anxious and listen, literally, to the sounds they make when they’re frightened.

Her close observations and attention to animal psychology pay off when Grandin is invited to design her first livestock facility, where she builds a “dip” for bathing the cows that has them enter the water through a curved passageway meant to simulate their natural pattern of movement. By keeping the animals angelically calm, she cuts down on the need for animal handlers. Even viewers who have never considered the well being of livestock can understand the elegance of her design, and the film’s intermittent use of diagrams—meant to simulate Grandin’s visual sensibility—only serve to strengthen her case.

Like Grandin herself, the film stays ruthlessly on point. “We raise them for us,” Grandin’s character says on more than one occasion, “We owe them some respect.” Grandin’ approach is pragmatic and she appears to take industrial-size livestock facilities as a fact of life. But her goal to reform their design is expressed in terms that the industry can relate to: “I believe that what’s good for the animal is also good for business,” she tells a conference room full of skeptical cowboy-hat-wearing executives.

While the film doesn’t concern itself with larger questions about meat eating or the unnatural and overblown scales of the confined animal feeding lots, Grandin creates systemic change by physically re-designing a slaughterhouse. (We are told in the film’s credits that over the last several decades, Grandin has had some control in designing as many as half of the slaughter facilities in the United States.) The film illustrates Grandin’s core belief: that a cow’s life is as valuable for its own sake as it is for our consumption. So when she envisions a cow on its way to a slaughterhouse she has designed, she sees the animal as, “in that moment…..still an individual.” “It was calm,” she says, “and then it was gone.”

Like the real Grandin, the film’s central character takes concrete, lasting steps toward a more humane food system. But Temple Grandin shouldn’t be dismissed as an innocuous, feel-good film. Some viewers may choose to see it as a challenge—a challenge to give all differently-abled people an opportunity to articulate their vision of the world—and an invitation to treat every animal as a creature of value, deserving of our utmost respect.

Watch a clip of the BBC movie, ”The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow“, on the real Temple Grandin

Here is the trailer for the HBO film:

If it’s true that you can judge a nation by how it treats its most vulnerable members, then unfortunately for Japan, it may be no better than the U.S., when it comes to its treatment of animals. The Cove, a riveting documentary about the nation’s barbaric slaughter of dolphins, reveals the dark underbelly of a culture better known for its love of tradition, civility, and sushi. Now the Oscar winner for “Best Documentary,” The Cove beat out Food, Inc. (reviewed on Civil Eats), a contender for this year’s category as well. While Food, Inc. offers a sweeping panoramic view of America’s broken food system, bringing to light the detrimental costs of cheap food seen in our nation’s grocery stores, factory farms and cornfields, The Cove succeeds by expertly focusing on a single event in a remote Japanese village.
Through the lens of former National Geographic photographer, Louie Psihoyos, we witness the annual slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins in an isolated cove located in a national park in Taiji, Japan.

One of the great successes of Psihoyos’s film is its element of suspense, as the camera crew shadows renowned dolphin expert, Richard O’Barry, while he tries to gain entry into the well-guarded cove. The brisk cat and mouse drama is gripping, as O’Barry and his crew elude local police officers, petty bureaucrats and Japanese fishermen, who harass them as they move closer to the protected waters where the annual killings take place.

O’Barry became famous in the 1960s for capturing and training dolphins in the beloved TV show, Flipper. Airing from 1964 to 1967, the show became an instant classic and was likened to “an aquatic Lassie,” focusing on the clever hijinks of a bottlenose dolphin named Flipper. While the show introduced a generation of American children to the playful intelligence of dolphins, the untimely death of one of the five captured female dolphins, Kathy, led O’Barry to become an activist. O’Barry launched into a career to free dolphins from captivity, as the dolphin showcasing industry was just beginning to take off as an entertainment attraction.

In The Cove, O’Barry leads Psihoyos and his camera crew around Taiji, in a frantic race to expose the truth about dolphin abuse and capture it on film. He explains how the rise of SeaWorld, dolphin shows, and dolphin swim parks, have created an expensive niche market for the sale of these prized animals—selling for as much as $150,000 each. Taiji, Japan is ground zero for both the capture and slaughter of these beautiful mammals.

In the cover of darkness, O’Barry sneaks around the cove with the film crew, as they place hidden cameras in this secretive zone.
 When all is said and done, these daring filmmakers capture the horrifying scene of Japanese fisherman impaling dolphins, turning the waters red with blood and filling the cove with the eerie cry of dolphins, desperate to escape death. 
Ironically, Flipper, the show that exposed millions of Americans to one of the most intelligent mammals on the planet, has consequently been a source of their heartbreaking destruction. In a world where the ocean is marked with catastrophic decline, with the rate of decline accelerating, this senseless violence is beyond imagination.
 Despite repeated efforts to stop the killing, Japanese fishermen defend their annual slaughter as a form of “pest control.” Ultimately, hiding under the thin veil of “scientific study,” the slaughter of dolphins is unlikely to receive significant attention from the Japanese.

Seafood is a staple of their diet and killing whales continues with official government sanction. 
However, when O’Barry reveals that slaughtered dolphin meat is being served to local school children, the Japanese are stunned.

Endorsing the emblematic union of greed and official collusion, the local mayor has created a program where Taiji school children are forced to eat slaughtered dolphin meat. Considering that dolphin meat in Japan can contain as much as 5,000 times more mercury than allowable under Japanese law, the local mayor’s decision to feed this tainted meat to students is criminal.

For those left stunned by the senseless slaughter witnessed in The Cove—that this behavior continues to take place in the 21st century, that a civilized nation continues to allow it, that government officials are willing accomplices—there are more documentaries to learn from. The Cove’s American counterpart, Food, Inc., shines a bright spotlight on similar injustices in the food system found across America, where farmers, farm workers, consumers and rural citizens, are regularly ground under the heel of industrial agribusiness in its endless quest for profit. It is a remarkable statement that these two films were singled out by the Academy for potential awards. The success of these films depends on viewership,  dissemination of information and consequent change in policy. Their nominations–and one win–are also an indicator that the power of citizen engagement is only gaining steam.

Fortunately, for activists and concerned citizens around the globe, a new era of documentary exposure is dawning. While the violence in The Cove may prove too brutal for some to watch, this film serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of our global actions and our individual responsibilities to stand up to injustice, on behalf of the helpless among us.

Watch the trailer for The Cove here:

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released.  Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. I watched this film in several ten-minute segments via YouTube because it hasn’t been released in the US, primarily due to legal pressure brought upon the producer (Tracy Worcester) by the film’s main “villain,” Smithfield Foods (the world’s largest pork producer).  Despite four letters threatening litigation, the UK’s Channel 4 played the film last summer.  But since no US insurer would back the film’s release here in the States due to concerns over threatened lawsuits from Smithfield, it has become essentially a black market film.  Thus as Americans have fought censorship by our government for more than 200 years, corporate censorship continues unabated.

Smithfield does, in one sense, have cause for concern: this film certainly does not show their company in the most favorable light.  Right off the bat the viewer is struck with some rather gruesome images of pigs being brutally mistreated, apparently at the hands of workers in Smithfield-run facilities.  We hear from farmers and neighbors complaining of health problems that they tie to the fumes and water contamination from Smithfield hoglots.  When this large corporation and their methods of competition had pushed the owner of a small family farm in Poland out of business, he said, “I don’t know whether I should retire, hang myself, or emigrate.”

In Poland in the early 90’s, there were 27,500 independent pig farmers.  Today there are 2,200 hoglots, and 1,600 of them are wholly owned by Smithfield Foods.  Smithfield has 52,000 employees processing 27 million pigs per year in 15 countries and accruing annual sales around $12 billion.  Each of those factory farms in Poland replaced 10 family farms with 2-3 minimum wage jobs.  Any objective accountant might call that efficiency, but one protester in the film had another way to describe it:

Why is it, when people are in bondage to their government it is called ‘tyranny,’ but when the oppressor is a multinational corporation, it is called ‘efficiency?’

It was precisely this form of “efficiency” the art and social critic John Ruskin had in mind when he said “There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse, and sell a little more cheaply.  The person who buys on price alone is this man’s lawful prey.”

Smithfield is not alone under Worcester’s microscope: she takes large financial institutions to task as well.  In an interview with noted Belgian economist Bernard Lietaer, he points out that Big Finance has its fingers in absolutely everything–making 1/3 of all political contributions in the US.  This is a figure that is sure to only increase in light of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Citizen’s United case.  Big Money’s influence, along with that of many other large and wealthy corporations, dictates the type and scope of laws throughout the US and the world.  My daddy used to call this the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.

That influence is precisely what makes the competitive practices of Smithfield (not to mention many other agribusiness conglomerates) patently unfair.  As Pig Business points out, if the likes of Smithfield had to pay for the damages they cause–to the environment and to human health–then any small farmer in the world could out-compete them.  But they don’t, because the game is rigged.

So most of the time agribusiness will take its profits and go obliviously on its way.  But if anyone points out that this emperor has no clothes, they have scads of lawyers and PR professionals to make certain no one hears.  Watching Pig Business on YouTube is one small way to get past their invisible hand.

In 2007, a research vessel stationed off the coast of eastern Canada cast two fishing lines, each with 1,500 hooks, in order to estimate how many cod were left in this region’s waters. They caught only a few fish. Eleven years earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney had declared a moratorium on cod fishing with the goal of rebuilding the species’ population back to a secure, if not profitable, number. The Arctic cod population, like that of Western Atlantic bluefin tuna, Chesapeake Bay scalloped hammerhead shark, Atlantic salmon, North Sea haddock, Southern Atlantic snowy grouper, East Gulf of Mexico red snapper and American plaice, is reaching what director Rupert Murray foresees as “the end of the line.” His so-titled documentary examines the decline of our ocean’s diverse species while proposing immediate solutions.

His film gives us the chance to see what the ocean actually looks like and how it is affected by industrial fishing. Murray frequently returns to frames of our oceans’ surface waters—their vastness extends toward an infinite horizon line. We witness fishermen from Senegal and the Strait of Gibraltar pull netted fish from the water, we see images of bounty, and we begin to reckon the sheer mass of fish killed. There are recurring images of hooks, blood and swarming catches. Anchovies are processed for fishmeal—the pile of dead fish appears limitless.

These images reappear variously in many local landscapes documented. Halifax, Alaska, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Lampadusa and Senegal bear a universal problem and it blends into one common visual. But opinions on industrial fishing tell a less cohesive story and this documentary presents the argument through two divergent perspectives.

“We are fighting a war against fish,” scientist Daniel Pauly explains. Though he is pro- sustainable fishing, he identifies man’s increasing power within the fishing industry—technological nautical advancement, increasing consumer demand, influential policy-making and greedy corporate control—to explain why humans are unwilling to restrain themselves from destroying fish populations. “Fisherman cheat because they can. Fisherman cheat because they won’t get caught. That’s true of all systems,” says Charles Clover, on whose book this movie is based. On a phone call with the manager at Nobu London, Clover asks why the restaurant refuses to take bluefin tuna off the menu. The manager avoids the obvious answer: because it is popular, fish are fashionable and consumers will buy it. Instead, he offers a guarantee that the menu will warn customers about endangered fish by putting an asterisks and a note beside any fish that qualifies. We know that bluefin tuna are in crisis, yet corporations large and small care little about preserving the population.

The largest purchaser of bluefin tuna is Mitsubishi. Estimates by one tuna researcher claim that the multinational corporation now controls about 60% of the total production of Northern bluefin tuna in the Atlantic and Mediterranean through its freezing and transportation capacities. Each year scientists calculate in tons the numbers needed to regulate and rebuild tuna populations. They then recommend their findings to an EU fishing ministry. To maintain the Atlantic bluefin tuna population, fisherman would have to reduce their yearly catch to 15,000 tons. To see the population rejuvenate, the catch limit would have to be 10,000 tons. Knowing this information, EU ministers have voted for a cap of 29,500 tons—and in real numbers, Atlantic bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean are actually fished to unregulated capacities of 61,000 tons per year, about 1/3 of the total bluefin population. When governments simply refuse responsibility for stricter regulations, fishery commissions can ignore scientific truths. But the race against fish, controlled by human competition, is also influenced by denial—a fisherman in Senegal speaks straight into the camera to claim “the sea has betrayed us.”

Still, there is optimism in the End of the Line. Understanding the resistance they are up against, scientists regulating fish extinction believe that there is hope in unveiling real numbers, actual species disappearances and major changes to our ecosystem. Public knowledge enhances transparency. Because fish populations are collapsing at calculable, consistent rates, scientists aver with confidence that if changes are not made to the fishing industry, most fish we eat today will disappear by 2048.

End of the Line is an educational tool and a call to arms. Murray imparts three written commandments to his viewers as the film ends: consumers, politicians and advocates must enact change. We must be curious eaters, asking questions about where our fish comes from and whether it is sustainably produced. Helping us on this front, Clover has launched a new site called Fish2Fork, which features sustainability grades for restaurants that serve fish all over the world — and you can add reviews. In addition, politicians need to value science and take control of fishing regulations and fisherman must be forced to observe the rules. Advocates for a sustainable fishing movement must work for the creation of more ocean reserves like the one filmed in the Exuma Cays of the Bahamas. Here, endangered and collapsing fish species swim freely in an area protected by no-fishing laws. 1% of our ocean is currently protected from commercial fishing; the remaining 99% is an illusion of abundance.

When industrial fish farming began in 1952, the number of boats trolling for catch was not anywhere near today’s fleet. One and a half billion fishing hooks a year are attached to lines so long, they could wrap around the world 550 times over. One-tenth of the world’s entire catch captured using long line and trawling methods is thrown back overboard. Seven million tons of sea creatures ranging from turtles to dolphins to sea birds are not even brought to market. As we “win” the fight against fish by exploiting the ocean’s exhaustible resources, Murray challenges us to ask what we have to gain by doing so.

You can see the film at a screening near you. Meanwhile, here is the trailer:

What happens in Iowa doesn’t stay in Iowa. This is the lesson illuminated in Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney’s latest film, Big River, a companion to their successful film King Corn (made with director Aaron Wolff). In King Corn, Ellis and Cheney grew an acre of corn and followed it to the plate by way of the processing that brings us most of our packaged food and the confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) that bring us 99% of our meat. This time around, they follow the top soil, fertilizer runoff, and pesticide residues from the acre they planted into the local water system and further to the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone.

Big River begins during the floods that overtook Iowa in 2007, which lead Ellis and Cheney to ponder the ecological consequences of the farming methods they used on their acre of corn. To discover just how modern farming affects the local community and beyond, they hop into a canoe and move down river to visit the largest nitrate-removal facility in the world — a necessary technology used to clean Iowan’s drinking water; a fertilizer factory, which replaces the land’s natural fertility with a process that uses natural gas to extract nitrogen from the air (the result is nitrates that bind with water and are easily pulled downstream); and  the fisheries of Louisiana, where a 300-mile long dead zone filled with those nitrates is fueling an algae bloom that is killing the fish.

Perhaps the worst legacy of our modern farming system, though, has remained on the farm. The land Ellis and Cheney grew their corn on in Iowa is owned by Chuck and LeVon Pyatt, conventional farmers who have been using pesticides and artificial fertilizers for many years. While they were filming, LeVon succumbed to non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a disease tied to pesticide exposure that is all too prevalent in this part of the country. It seems that the system that pushes us to try and grow as much corn as possible no matter the costs might just have human lives on its hands, as the incidences of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has more than doubled since the 1970s.

Check out the trailer for Big River:

The film is going to be traveling the country this year, where it will be screened at theaters, universities and homes near you. And if its not showing near you, you can go to the website and sign up to host a screening for your community of both King Corn and Big River.

But wait! There is more you can do to promote change in a system that is bad for the environment, the economy and our health: Big River‘s creators urge you to write Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and tell him that Green Payments make a better alternative than subsidies for the next Farm Bill; encourage him to prohibit the use of Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) funds for Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs); ask him to think about the next generation of family farmers, and help them get access to land, training, and federal dollars that support sustainable agriculture; and nudge him to help farm families test their wells for contaminants, as too many rural residents are exposed to chemical residues. It wouldn’t hurt either if he watched Big River, or hosted a screening at the USDA. The more information, the better the opportunity for improving the quality of life for hardworking, rural Americans.