A new film is being produced on Haiti’s crisis, its roots and its future.  Hands That Feed has made a short intro video about their project in order to try to raise the necessary funding for the film’s production.  The film will explore questions about what the real problems facing Haiti are, and from the video it’s clear that the recent earthquake was simply an exacerbation of pre-existing problems.

Haiti’s dependence on food aid seems to be an unnecessary and reparable problem.  The film shows how the organization, Nouvelle Vie, is working to empower young people to take back their nation’s food production.  Through education, this program creates sustainable aid that will allow the participants to learn about agriculture and teach it to others.  By employing active solutions on the ground, Nouvelle Vie seeks to help Haiti both recover and grow.

Watch the video and visit the kickstarter website.  In order to get funding for the entire project, the group needs to raise $15,000 by Monday.  If they do not raise the money, all donations will be returned and the project will remain unfunded.  However, a generous donor has offered to independently match the next $2,000 raised, so go check out the site and consider making a donation.

Haiti’s self-determination has been undermined by food aid.  Hatians have been turned into dependents, relying on rich nations for food, when they have everything they need to take back control.  Help this story be told about a new generation of leaders rising up who will create sustainable change.

By Adam Liss

Hello, my name is Adam, and I’m about to hit you with some contradictions, so please bear with me.  I recently finished building a website as part of the New Jewish Filmmaking Project.  However, there was no film involved.  The website is about Judaism and environmentalism.  It’s also about zombies.  Like I said, please bear with me.

This was actually my second time as a member of the New Jewish Filmmaking Project (or NJFP as it’s usually called).  The program, which is now in its 8th year, partners with the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival to give aspiring young storytellers the chance to work on professional-level film projects.  My first go-round with the NJFP happened when I was in high school, and I did in fact work on a film.  This year, however, saw the participants, who ranged in age from 15 to 25, working on a diverse range of online multimedia projects.  So, in addition to producing several short films that will be shown throughout the course of the festival, the participants also created their own websites that dealt with Jewish heritage, family history, and cultural identity.  Or, in my case, zombies.

Now, you may be wondering what the connection is between zombies, Judaism, and environmentalism.  No, it’s not an undead rabbi driving a Prius, although that is… kind of awesome.  No, what links these three things is their focus on survival.  Before I started working on the site, I’d noticed that a lot of my friends had, independently of each other, developed plans for what they’d do in case of a zombie outbreak.  This was curious.  However, in addition to the stuff you’d expect like stealing cars, shooting zombies, and running around the White House naked, there were also more practical elements like finding shelter, growing food, and, the middle ground, brewing your own beer.  As weird as it may sound, zombie survivalists have a lot in common with environmentalists.

So, in addition to writing a piece about zombies, and another about the Torah as a survival guide (which I won’t go into here), I also wanted to explore the connection between environmentalism and survival.  And, as luck would have it, my mom was invited to show her film, A Home on the Range, at last year’s Hazon Food Conference.  I wasn’t really sure what I would write about it, but I figured an event about Judaism AND environmentalism was too good to pass up.  As it turns out, what impressed me the most when I talked to my mom about her experiences at the conference was how impressed she was with it.  See, I’ve always thought of my mom as a very environmental person.  I mean, she composts, she uses CFLs, she drives a Prius–she lived in San Francisco during the Summer of Love for crying out loud—what more was there?  Well, apparently a lot.  Again, I’ll let you read the whole thing, but what impressed her the most was both the breadth (there were hundreds of people at the conference) and the depth (how everything from Priuses to pickles can be viewed environmentally) of this new environmental movement.  Indeed, seeing it at this scale, she realized how environmentalism was deeply intertwined with human survival.

Anyways, you can read all three of the stories here, and you can also check out the other ten projects, which I would highly recommend.  For those of you living in the Bay Area, you can catch screenings of several of the over 50 short films produced as part of the project at this year’s Film Festival.  In addition, there will be kiosks placed in the theater lobbies for the duration of the festival, so you can explore all the projects in their entirety.  So, whether you’re into carrots, corpses, or knishes, there’s a little something for everyone.

What’s Organic About Organic asks what the implications of growing food organically or not actually are.  This hour-long film covers a lot of ground.   Its short length and breadth of issues make this movie a good discussion-starter amongst peers, family, and friends.   Watching What’s Organic About Organic left me with a sense that we don’t necessarily know the whole story about conventionally grown food or the benefits of organic,  it made me want to learn more and be a more educated consumer.

This film is a basic introduction to what organic fundamentally means.  Its goal is to promote conscientious food purchasing, namely, to buy organic.

Many people dismiss organic food as a way for companies to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their pockets for a product that is relatively the same.  In my own discussions with family and friends, this is largely the consensus.  What’s Organic About Organic responds to this claim in several ways.  Perhaps most importantly, it shows that the costs of conventionally grown food are externalized to taxpayers, for example, paying for pollution clean up or medical costs for pesticide exposure.  Many of the organic farmers in the film stress that when you buy organic, you are paying for better nutrition, freedom from harmful pesticides, and more sustainable farming methods.

One thing that is made clear through interviews in the film is that chemicals and pesticides cause steep health costs to plants, animals, topsoil, and humans alike.  An interview with an organic farmer who grew up on a conventional farm exemplifies this best.  When the farmer was 7 years old , his dog who had been playing with pesticide-sprayed crickets died from eating them and the pesticide they were covered in.  He realized the pesticides on the bugs killed his dog, and at that moment he knew there was something wrong with those chemicals, that if they could hurt bugs and dogs, they could certainly hurt people.  These are the same chemicals that we are constantly ingesting from conventionally grown foods.  One person in the film said it best when he pointed out that pesticides are sprayed on to withstand rainstorms so it follows they can probably withstand the washings we give food before we eat it.

The experience that this man had as a 7 year old, seeing first-hand the effects of pesticides, brought him an understanding that those of us who are unfamiliar with conventional farming practices don’t get to have.  Many farmers in the film spoke about their belief that if people truly knew what conventional farming techniques were, they would happily choose organic.  Practices such as the use of sewage sludge for fertilizer, feeding chicken excrement to other animals, and pumping cows full of antibiotics are not exceptions; they are the standard in conventional “agriculture”.

The film’s conclusion seems to be that, our dependence on “chemically addicted”, conventionally grown food is not sustainable.  Further, there is a solution!  It’s not radical, it’s not about quick fixes, and it is profitable.  The use of farming practices that have been used for centuries, encouraging and capitalizing on nature’s own processes, works.  What’s Organic About Organic shows that the most traditional and natural farming methods are also the most sustainable.  These farming techniques used to be “normal” and it’s up to us to support a return to these methods and take care of our own health by understanding the food we eat.

I only covered a few of the issues shown in the movie here, so be sure to check out the film’s website at whatsorganicmovie.com where you can learn more, find showings, and contact them to host a screening.  The film also touches on the use of antibiotics, loss of topsoil, and the divide between large scale agribusiness organics and small organic farms (to name a few).

What’s Organic About Organic has opened this week in New York City.  There is a series of premier screenings with expert panels after the film.  For a complete schedule, click here

This week, as Earth Day came and went and I attended a fair here or an Earth celebration there, it also donned on me that Spring is here!

So, beyond my environmental excursions, I also attended of variety of events held on my very own Columbia University. Yet, what I found was an inability to fully appreciate some of the events due to the ubiquity of plastic water bottles. Some may laugh, but I find myself becoming more and more annoyed with these obnoxious bottles that I suddenly see everywhere. As I have previously written about bottled water, my awakening began when seeing the movie “Blue Gold: World Water War’s” on instant play on Netflix. Then, I really became irked when seeing “The Story of Bottled Water,” which I posted on this blog.

Last week though, I attended another water documentary screening, this one a full length feature exclusively focused on the water bottle industry. Now, the movie does a lot of pointing fingers. Most obviously, the manufacturers, NESTLE, Coca-cola, and Pepsi Co., bear a large portion of the blame.

Yet, beyond these stormtroopers, the film also criticizes the manufacturing of plastic bottles, or specifically the type of plastic used for water bottles. Called “PET” or “PETE”, this plastic has traces of all sorts of toxins linked to all kinds of health hazards. The most common and perhaps scariest is the link between the toxins in the plastics and fetal development. You would think the Right-to-Life community would be all over this one?

We remember the BPA discovery that destroyed Nalgene and made SIGGs cooler than Uranus, but what we don’t realize is that much of the plastic in your “Poland Spring” “Dasani” “Deer Park” or “Aquafina” contains some trace of BPA, benzene, or some other kind of harmful toxins. Though it seems impossible to escape simply breathing in toxins because of the pollution we all breathe daily, it is more distressing that we choose (most of the time out of ignorance) to put these poisons in our body.

And just to reiterate, Dasani and Aquafina are JUST PURIFIED TAP WATER. It is exactly what you drink out of the sink! Only it’s less healthy because there are some other salts and chemicals in it, as well as, whatever has mixed into the water from the plastic bottles.

And this is the danger. We don’t know why and how these poisons leak into the water contained in the bottle. Now, we know not to drink a bottle if it has been sitting in your car in the heat, yet none of us know where that bottle came from before we bought in the store. Perhaps it was sitting in a heated area. Or perhaps, simply long liquid exposure with the plastic releases some of the toxins into the water. I don’t know, but either way, tests (from the film) found that the water in plastic water bottles is often highly polluted and/or toxic.

So, take all this information and then attend some University events I did this past weekend. Every event had an assortment of drinks, including plastic water bottles. The BBQ on Saturday Afternoon on the South Lawns, in the middle of the heat of the day, had plastic water bottles to drink.

Forget everything I have just written about the health dangers of bottled water. Consider this:

Imagine the price of a 6-pack of .5 L bottled water to be about $6 (let’s say 1 dollar for every bottle)
Multiply that by however many people are coming to your event (let’s say 50 ppl): $300

Already you have spent several hundreds of dollars on something you can get essentially FREE:
84 oz pitcher (from wal-mart.com): around $20
Igloo 10 gallon water cooler: Around $80

So it is obviously much cheaper to have someone refilling the water at your event, then buying bottled water for “convenience” (I’m sure your constituents won’t mind the poison you serve with that “convenient” bottled water).

One good thing about Tapped: The Movie was contact it made with another organization – Food and Water Watch – about how to “get off the bottle” and reclaim the TAP. The produced a brochure about how public events can easily be ran without plastic bottled water. The more we refuse to serve it in our public events, the more people will stop using it.

Please, if you are reading this and you are organizing an event soon, DON’T BUY PLASTIC BOTTLED WATER. There are other, healthier ways of keeping your peeps refreshed.

To read more astonishing facts, here is the No Impact Man’s opinion.

If you haven’t had a chance to see Food, Inc., carpe diem! PBS recently aired it on POV, television’s oldest showcase for independent non-fiction films. POV has also put the entire film on their site for free viewing for a limited time. It’s only up until April 28, so check it out today!

After thousands of community screenings and grassroots word-of-mouth, you can finally watch FRESH at the theater. We’re opening at the Quad Cinema Friday April 9th. In the spirit of our grassroots model, we’ve organized a long list of how-to workshops, farm to table dinners, lectures and tastings just for you – including two lectures this Sunday by Joel Salatin (details below)

So pick up your fork, get your hands in some dirt and discover new ways to support real food in the city! Almost all FRESH Week event tickets include a redeemable voucher for a FRESH movie ticket at the Quad, so what are you waiting for? GET FRESH NYC!

Below is just a sampling of the events we have planned.

Thursday, April 1st: FRESH KICK-OFF: WINE & CHEESE TASTING

Nibble, sip and chat beside Xavier Roux’s 60-foot ant sculpture at The Invisible Dog, the FRESHest new gallery in town. ana Sofia joanes, the director of FRESH, will be here at 6:30pm for this kickoff event to FRESH Week, so come by and say hello! Cheese and carbon-neutral, bio-dynamic wines from Paul Dolan vineyards will be featured.

Joel Salatin Lecture “Can you feed the world? –Answering elitism, production, and choice.”
Sunday, April 4 2010
5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Teachers College / Columbia University (Broadway between 120th and 121st Streets New York, NY)

By far and away the two most common questions asked of Joel Salatin are: How can we afford local artisanal heritage-based food? And: Is it realistic to think we can really feed the world with a non-industrial food system? Because the local clean food movement, for all its allure, is still only some 2 percent of all food sales, envisioning it as a credible, viable alternative to industrial corporatized genetically modified food seems like pie-in-the-sky dreaming. Using his own Polyface Farm principles as a foundation, Joel builds this vision one piece at a time by blending theory and practice. You will never think about the food system the same way again.

CLICK HERE to purchase tickets now.  Tickets: $35 At this event you will receive a movie voucher to see FRESH at Quad Cinema from April 9-15.  For a 20% discount on tickets, use password FRESHpromo

Joel Salatin Lecture “The sheer ecstasy of being a lunatic farmer.”
Sunday, April 4 2010
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
Teachers College / Columbia University (Broadway between 120th and 121st Streets New York, NY)

In this mischievous lecture, Joel Salatin compares the industrial global food paradigm with the heritage local food paradigm. Using hilarious stories from his family’s Polyface Farm experience, Salatin examines the contrast on many different levels: fertility, carbon cycling, energy use, relationships, marketing, and spirit. If you ever wondered: “What’s really the difference between pastured poultry and Tyson’s”? –now you’ll know.

CLICK HERE to purchase tickets now.  Tickets: $35 At this event you will receive a movie voucher to see FRESH at Quad Cinema from April 9-15.  For a 20% discount on tickets, use password FRESHpromo

For a full listing of NYC FRESH events please visit www.FRESHthemovie.com

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

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.

“Nora!” is about Nora Pouillon, who forged the organic restaurant niche with Dupont’s Restaurant Nora and later nearby (and now sadly defunct) Asia Nora. “Nora!” was selected for the Our Heart category. D.C.-based VideoTakes, Inc. produced both films.

“Nora was a pioneer in this town,” Yonkers said, “being brave long before people understood the value of organic and daring to make food your own way.” Pouillon not only opened the first certified organic restaurant in the nation, but encouraged the first FRESHFARM markets more than a decade ago, hoping to see something like New York City’s Union Square’s fresh food utopia in her adopted city.

Other films will look at Washington, D.C.’s go-go music scene, the art workshop in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital maximum security ward, the history of Jews in Washington, the story of a gay Washingtonian couple struggling for acceptance, the Capital Pool Men’s Checkers Club in the Shaw neighborhood, and background of the Silver Spring train station.

Yachad Executive Director Audrey Lyon believes that the District and good eats share a natural connection. “It’s not surprising that films about DC should include those about food,” she said in an email. “Washington is a place for foodies.”

Yonkers plans to invite some of the market’s farmers to attend the screening on Valentine’s Day. She and her husband may be heading back to their own farm on Maryland’s eastern shore, but whether she can make it or not, she looks forward to the films spreading the message about the environmental and culinary benefits of local foods. This will add to a realization more and more Washingtonians are making about local eating: “It’s not only a ’should,’” Yonkers said, “but it’s a pleasure.”

More information for Washingtonians: The third annual Our City Film Festival, the only showcase of independent films that examine the Washington, D.C. area’s local history, culture, and personalities, will be held from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at the Goethe Institute, 812 7th St., NW.

Photo: Local restaurateur Nora Pouillon in an Our City Film Festival movie. Image from Yachad.

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.

Green Screens and Independents Night Presents
FRESH
Tuesday, Oct. 27, 6:30 p.m.

Director Ana Sofia Joanes will join David Haight, New York Director of American Farmland Trust; Hudson Valley Farmer Cheryl Rogowski (winner of a 2004 MacArthur Fellow Genius Grant) and moderator Jen Small of AFT and Flying Pigs Farm for a discussion and reception following the screening at Lincoln Center 70 W 63RD St New York, NY 10023

And if you don’t find yourself in NYC this Tuesday, you can click here to find a screening near you.  Or you can also host your own screening, for more information click here or check out their website www.freshthemovie.com

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.

It turned out that if I wanted to use whole grains, I needed to knead, so I found a good recipe, added all the ingredients together, and shoved it around on the table and punched it. This, as any veterans will know, did not lead to stellar results. My sourdough starter gave me a bread that looked and tasted like a huge pickle, and my potato bread was somewhat too baked. I was starting to think I’d never get it right. This was fine with me, I’d eat sour, hard bread forever, but alas, not everyone in my life is so inclined. Several months ago my girlfriend began to put “one loaf crusty bread” on the shopping list in a rather prominent position and I knew I was running out of time.

Then, last week, a friend of mine lent me her copy of the Tassajara Bread Book. She considers it the bible of breadmaking (although actually, the bible is kind of the bible of breadmaking). Sure enough, at the end of my day of breadbaking, having beat, folded and kneaded in between grading papers and reading for class, I pulled two loaves out of the oven and both of them are high, broad, brown and crispy on the outside and chewy and fluffy on the inside. What happened? Ed Espe Brown taught me to mix, to knead, and to use two packs of yeast.

Apparently, Brown’s is a household name for everyone either 1) over forty and into natural foods, or 2) from the west coast. Being that I’m neither though, I figured some of us could use a bit of background information. Brown is one of our kind, in that he approaches food and cooking through a religious/spritual lens, his being Zen Buddhism.  He’s the author of numerous cookbooks, and was for years the chef at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco. The Bread Book doesn’t read like a koan though– it’s as straight-forward as a cookbook gets. It’s even illustrated, so if you’ve despaired of ever raising a good loaf, don’t. Give Brown’s technique a try and see how high those babies climb.

At the moment, there’s a movie about Brown out on DVD. You can see the trailer below. Happy baking in the new year!