Omnivore Atlanta

ITVS Community Cinema will host a preview of “King Corn,” a feature documentary written and produced by Curt Ellis, Ian Cheney, and Aaron Woolf, at the Decatur Library on Tuesday, March 25 at 7 p.m.

The film, directed by Woolf, follows Ellis and Cheney, two Yale buddies concerned about America’s obesity epidemic, on a year-long journey in a small county in rural Iowa. They rent an acre of land and grow a “bumper” crop of corn and supposedly discover that the grain is one of the main culprits behind our fast-food nation. They also raise some red flags about how we eat and how we farm.
“For the first time in American history, our generation was at risk of having a shorter lifespan than our parents. And it was because of what we ate.”

—Curt Ellis, filmmaker

www.pbs.org/independentlens/kingcorn

“King Corn” will premiere as part of the sixth season of the PBS television series “Independent Lens” on Tuesday, April 15, at 10 p.m. Check out a promotional clip of the film here.

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Still undecided on who to vote for in the upcoming primaries and presidential election? Never fear — I’ve got the information to help you make up your mind: where the candidates stand on … food! That’s right, health care, education and security might be kinda important, I guess, but where the candidates stand on issues of food is the real test.

OK, maybe not. But I did think it would be interesting to take a look at what different candidates had to say about our food supply and our farm communities, as well as food safety. Anyone who has followed the politics of food in the past few years, or read Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, knows that government legislation is directly affecting what we eat, what is available to us and at what prices, and contributing to the obesity epidemic in America. So where do this crop of presidential candidates stand on these issues? I decided to check it out.

What follows is everything I could find on the top three Democratic and Republican candidate’s websites, as well as some searching on their voting records and press about their activities relating to these issues. It’s not the most appetizing stuff in the world, but I think it gives an interesting insight into how deeply some of them are thinking about an issue that probably won’t get a ton of attention in the upcoming elections.

Barack Obama

Obama is the only candidate I could find who specifically mentions supporting local and organic food on his website. Under the “Issues” tab in the section devoted to the steps Obama will take on issues related to agriculture, it reads:

Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: Obama will help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and reform crop insurance to not penalize organic farmers. He also will promote regional food systems.

Obama also supports country-of-origin labeling, so consumers will know how far food has traveled to get to our shelves, and so shoppers have the option to consciously buy American.

(more…)

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Michael Pollan, undoubtedly America’s best writer about food politics, had a mind-blowing column in the Nov. 4 New York Times about the way our bloated farm subsidy programs add to the children’s obesity epidemic and other health problems by supporting poor nutrition:

Americans have begun to ask why the farm bill is subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils at a time when rates of diabetes and obesity among children are soaring, or why the farm bill is underwriting factory farming (with subsidized grain) when feedlot wastes are polluting the countryside and, all too often, the meat supply. For the first time, the public health community has raised its voice in support of overturning farm policies that subsidize precisely the wrong kind of calories (added fat and added sugar), helping to make Twinkies cheaper than carrots and Coca-Cola competitive with water. Also for the first time, the international development community has weighed in on the debate, arguing that subsidized American exports are hobbling cotton farmers in Nigeria and corn farmers in Mexico.

As Pollan documents, the farm lobby simply buys off its critics by adding marginal programs to support healthy nutrition. Read the whole column here.

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