Meet Rachel Tali Kaplan, a young Jewish woman who is farming organically on 2 acres in Georgia. Warm, funny and intelligent, Rachel explores the challenges of farming, her passion for feeding people, and the importance of sustainable agriculture in today’s world. Christine Anthony and Owen Masterson shared this short film with us:

You’re A What? from Anthony-Masterson on Vimeo.

(A version of this post originally appeared on my D.C. Farmers Market Examiner site)

Washington D.C.’s FRESHFARM Markets’ new year started with good news: A mini documentary about the organization would be part of Yachad’s Our City Film Festival slated for February 14 at D.C.’s Goethe Institute. Not only that, but the film would appear alongside “Nora!” featuring a restaurateur who embraces local and organic food.

“I’m thrilled to have a film about FRESHFARM Markets and to document in some way how the markets were created and what vision was behind it,” said FRESHFARM co-director and co-founder Ann Yonkers.

Yachad, which mobilizes the Washington-area Jewish community to repair and rebuild lower-income neighborhoods, selected 14 films for the third annual festival and divided them into four categories—Our Body, Our Mind, Our Heart, and Our Soul. “FRESHFARM Markets” will appear in the body category and is, of course, about FRESHFARM and its nine producer-only markets in the D.C. area. Their markets include such favorites as the Dupont Circle farmers market and the farmers market at the White House.

The other day my boyfriend and I were enjoying a Sunday walk in Brooklyn when we ran into his friend Ana, her partner and their adorable new baby.  Among the introductions and pleasantries she mentioned that she was distributing her film FRESH.  “Here, tell me what you think of it,” she said handing me a copy, knowing I was a food writer.

So, one night a while later my boyfriend and I tucked into the sofa and watched FRESH, the new film by Ana Sofia Joanes.  As someone who has seen Food Inc and has read a lot of Michael Pollan, the material was not new to me, however I found the material’s presentation (forgive the pun) fresh.  I had found Food Inc to be a good film, but heavy on the propaganda.  I felt that FRESH got its message across in a far more even-handed way.  The film invoked a pretty good discussion, and I was happy to see on their website they had some additional educational materials and even a call for recipes.  But you don’t have to be a Jew and the Carrot writer or have chance encounters with the director to see this film.  If you live in the New York area there will be a screening this Tuesday.

Remember back in the day when you told someone you ate mostly vegetables and organic food and they told you they only ate food that tasted good? You’d ask them what wasn’t good about the organic food they’d tasted, and usually they’d describe some sort of hard, seedy, lumpy thing. They’d use the word “brick”.  They’d mime chewing like a mouth on novacain. I’m sorry to tell you, but they’d probably been eating bread at my house.

Here’s what happened: I decided maybe seven years ago that I was going to learn how to make bread, except I didn’t really understand why you would spend all that time shoving it around on a table and punching it  if you didn’t have to. Luckily, there was the Cuban bread recipe in a copy of the New York Times cookbook. That no-knead, no-nonsense bread was an excellent gateway drug, but it was also kind of flat; and when you make it with whole wheat or spelt, it ends up looking sort of like a large, good-smelling cow pie.

Fans of Julia Child would love the new film, Julie and Julia, as the director, Nora Ephron, depicted post-WWII Paris in bright, sunny colors and without reference to deprivations, electrical shortages or municipal strikes.  While I agree with A.O. Scott, the NYTimes film critic, that the cards were stacked against Amy Adams who plays the young memoirist, Julie Powell—the best scenes had Meryl Streep in it, naturally— Adams gave a fine, credible performance.  The director had eliminated the unpleasant parts of Powell’s memoir— the gratuitous cursing and the gossip about her friends’ love and sex lives— giving us a sweeter, cuter, slimmer Amy Adams-embodiment of Ms. Powell.  And 21st century New York City is unfairly  represented by industrial Queens (which does have some lovely neighborhoods after all), although there was a witty juxtaposition of an American water tower compared to the Eiffel Tower.

Thanks Nina for posting the trailor of Food, Inc. last month and for folk’s comments.

I recently had the fortune to join a group of community members from Boston’s Moishe/Kavod House Food Justice Campaign for a screening of the film. Here’s my review of the film–the good, the bad, and the ugly:

• I was first struck that the film would make an excellent education tool for students in grades 5-12 and beyond. Robert Kenner divides the film into chapters that do a nice job framing and connecting the dots on the key industries in our current food system–livestock issues, genetically modified organisms (GMO), the hidden costs of food and the ubiquity of corn. Showing this in health, science, political science or other classes would be a great way to provide students with a primer on where food comes from as well as a powerful, if at times graphic, illustration of what’s wrong with it.

In an era where just about everyone is counting pennies as well as calories, Berkeley-based husband and wife filmmaking duo Shira and Yoav Potash recently embarked on the “Food Stamp Challenge” where they ate on roughly one dollar per meal and a documented their low-budget food adventure in the film Food Stamped.  The film was screened last year at the Hazon Food Conference.  But you can catch the film this weekend at the JCC in Berkeley, CA.

There is indeed something Jewish about seltzer.

From whence exactly this Jewishness derives, I’m not so sure, but I do know one thing: I LOVE MY BUBBLY WATER.  And so, I give you my most recent episode of Cookin’ titled, “Fo’ Shizzle My Fizzle.”

To see more videos visit cookinshow.wordpress.com but for now, drink up!

Hey all you Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser fans!  Next month  Robert Kenner’s new film Food, Inc will be released in select cities.  Can’t wait that long?  Tomorrow, May 14, 2009, at 7:30pm in Houston Texas a FREE screening will be held at the Angelika Film Center.  To RSVP click here.

Not going to be in Texas tomorrow?  Well, next Wednesday, May 20, 2009, at 7:00pm at the Cantor Film Center in New York City there will be another FREE screening.  To RSVP click here.  More about the film after the jump.

Thanks so much for this hilarious guest post from author Max Gross.  Besides being a dead ringer for the actor Seth Rogen, Max is a writer for the New York Post and the author of From Schub to Stud. He blogs at fromschlubtostud.com

If you haven’t seen Seth Rogen recently, you might be disappointed.

He looks really, uh, good.

Svelte. Clean shaven. Neat. Not the slobby stoner that schlubs like myself could identify with.

What the hell happened, Seth? (I have a special interest in Rogen’s slovenliness – his appearance in the movie Knocked Up inspired me to write my own treatise called From Schlub to Stud about how we are living in the golden age of slobby man-children.)

But apparently sometime in the last few months, in preparation for his role in The Green Hornet, he dropped what looks like a good 30 to 40 pounds. And I, for one, was worried that his good cheer might be wrapped up in his weight. The thing that was so endearing about Rogen was the fact that he was so unapologetic about his excesses — a little like a young, Jewish Jack Falstaff.

It turns out, my worries are (I think) unfounded. If you saw him on The Daily Show last week, you would note that his good cheer is still in tact. More than in tact — his wit seems as sharp as ever. And Rogen fully acknowledged the 800 pound gorilla in the room: Namely that it is tough for a fellow tribesman to deny himself the pleasures of the plate.

I just wrote a new post on beekeeping in New York and local honeys for The Vine. While it’s illegal to keep bees in New York, beekeeping persists and there’s plenty of delicious local honey to prove it.  At a local honey tasting in SOHO some of the local honeys stole the show, and reflected the tastes and intricacies of New York itself.

And for a great video on the topic, Wendy Cohen and the Meerkat Media Arts Collective made a wonderful film on Colony Collapse Disorder and rooftop beekeeping on the East Coast, including in New York City.

This video, in honor of Hazon’s Party here in New York with the 92Y Tribeca is pretty cute. But what really caught my eye was just how much food played into it. Food can always be code for identity, but here I found the rapid fire use of mayo (not Jewish), rugelach and bagels and Manashevitz (need I even say, Jewish?), pork (not Jewish) and then the big finale of mayo = shmaltz a pretty funny way of coding the main character’s Jewiness. There are multiple “inappropriate” uses of Jewish foods which mark this little snippet as a Jewish parody of the original. What the original story is here is lost on me and my cultural cluelessness…

From friends and neighbors of mine, right here in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn - Cookin’.

Please note – I’ve rated these clips PG-13 for language…consider yourself warned!

Liz Alpern, publisher of New Voices magazine and Challah baker extraordinaire tells us a bit about Cookin’:

(cross posted from www.greenprophet.com)

I went to see Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s documentary film, “The Garden,” at Tribeca Cinemas in Manhattan, part of docs on the shortlist for the Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund. I went with a group of farmers living in New York, some of whom work on urban farming projects in and around the City.

The film tells the tragic story of the largest community garden in the United States in South Central Los Angeles. The garden, a full-fledged 14 acre farm in a blighted neighborhood, was created in response to the LA riots in an effort to heal the city. Lower income residents tended the garden. As the demographics of the area changed, more Latin Americans moved to the area and soon made up a majority of the farmers.

The film shows stunning images of corn and tomatoes growing amidst and industrial backdrop. In fact, the viewer sees countless helicopter images of this impressive green square in the middle of Los Angeles sprawl, demonstrating the stark contrast between sunflowers and concrete, verdancy and the pallor of urban industry. The importance of the garden to many of the gardeners is most inspiring, as many relied on the garden to feed their families and had been looking for empowering work to do in the city that would allow them to feed their families hearty and healthy meals.

The story, however, takes a dreadful turn as we see the end result of a failure of government. Without notice the farmers arrive one day to see a letter of eviction, signed by a developer whose name the farmers did not recognize. The mostly immigrant farmers were left asking, who is this developer, and isn’t this government land?