MayesFilmAnnotation7

Meredith Mayes Annotation #7: What’s On Your Plate? Word Count: 1,150 What’s On Your Plate was directed by Catherine Gund in 2009. It centrally focused on food consumption in the United States and the necessity of switching to locally grown foods to support the people in your neighborhood. The film is narrated and moved forward by the curiosity of two girls, Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Kai Riddle, who are on a quest to learn where and who their food comes from, and how they can live happier and healthier lives through their own awareness of their bodies. The film has some emotional appeal as they bring in family friends to help explain things such as diabetes and farming issues in a kid family way. The film is definitely geared towards younger children and their parents, as they focus on other kids and how they live in the city, eating school food, and children who help farm, in addition to bringing the Despite the film’s oversimplified nature, it does manage to draw some of the issues in the sustainability matrix out. First off, the film addresses the cultural phenomenon of fast food. First, for many families, especially in the city, it is often the only option available to those families with low incomes. Cheap food has lots of synthetic fillers, which is why it’s both cheap and bad for you. But other families eat it because it is what they grew up on, or don’t really have time, two cultural issues in the matrix. The first, that fast food is comfort food is an issue because comfort foods are traditionally things such as homemade chicken soup, or grandma’s goulash. The fact that these home staples have been replaced by manufactured chemicals is really a cultural travesty. Furthermore, Americans have an extremely busy lifestyle, but one’s lifestyle can be severely hindered by not eating right. I personally feel that if you do not have time to dedicate an hour and a half to feeding yourself and your family, you should probably slow down. I come from a family of two working parents, and we always ate together, and more often than not, it was a home-cooked or home prepared meal. While not everything was made from scratch, the majority of it was, since my mother is allergic to monosodium glutamate, a common food additive in prepared foods. Another interesting aspect that the film dealt with was the political issues of schools not being given enough money to purchase healthy food and prepare it on site, and then needing to purchase cheap, bad, frozen food for lunch rooms. The New York City school system is attempting to remediate this, but progress is slow, as about 1 million children are served each day, and that means that the budget must be stretched as far as it can go. The film also drew out the issue of declining farm numbers and how although a wide variety of produce could be grown locally, the majority of food sold in the United States is shipped from all over the world, from South America to New Zealand. These crops are not only bad for the environment due to the transportation pollution costs, but they undercut local farmer’s prices (since they need to make a profit in first-world living conditions). There were some convincing parts of the film. I really felt that the film did a good job of bringing in approachable “experts,” such as the beat box poet and the food expert, and it was really great that the president of Manhattan and Chef Jorge was willing to talk to them and explain their current plans. I feel as though a little more scientist involvement would have been great, aside from those doing the study, because they’re more credible than politicians and former teachers, but overall, the people they picked appealed to the audience targeted. Furthermore, the film did manage to incorporate good facts into the film, such as 90% of farmers have other full time jobs to support themselves. I also felt that the map demonstrating where individual items came from provided a good visual representation of the location of foods, and would have been better if more focus was put on it and really emphasized where produce came from. The problem with the film is that it is easy to dismiss such young narrators and their oversimplified view of the world, and it is also easier to dismiss interviews with other children, such as the girl who said that her organic would absorb the light that was melting the glaciers. The film did provide a good range of solutions. The girls proposed buying local from farms and co-ops. They also suggested growing some things at home and talking to your local farmers about having a share in their farm. The film really stressed the importance of awareness of your food and where it comes from, and I felt that the solutions it provided were achievable even by kids. I decided to look into the matter of international produce more. First, I examined the imports and exports of United States food production. According to the US Department of Agriculture ([]), in 2010, America imported 8.9 million metric tons of live farm animals, 1.3 million metric tons of meats, 2.4 million metric tons of fish and shellfish, 608,000 metric tons of dairy products, 7.9 million metric tons of vegetables, a staggering 10.68 million metric tons of fruit, 8.5 million metric tons of cereals and bakery items, in addition to importing coffee, tea, vegetable oils, sweets, cocoa and chocolate, and beverages. It is fairly obvious that some of these items such as coffee and chocolates would need to be imported, but why some of these other items? Perhaps it could be attributed to the crops we do grow. The majority of our crops appear to be feed corn (80% of corn produced does not go to human consumption) and soy beans, which are generally turned into soybean oil. The last statement is interesting, since most people don’t cook at home with soybean oil, so much of this crop must be going into processed foods ([]). The other issue in American food consumption is our wasting of food from cooking too much of it or buying too much and having it go bad. The University of Arizona did a study and established that about 40-50% of food ready for harvest never makes it into our mouths. Edible food is discarded, and this discarding results in the loss of billions of dollars for both producers and consumers. In addition, the average American family throws out about $600 of food per year, a total loss of $43 billion. This waste means that more food needs to be produced for us, resulting in higher usage of pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides ([]). People need to learn to evaluate what they really need for food.