Food and Country

reflections on our fundamentally broken food system

I recently had the opportunity to watch Food and Country, a documentary by legendary food writer Ruth Reichl and acclaimed director Laura Gabbert, and it altered the way I think about food storytelling.

Food and Country

When COVID hit at the beginning of 2020, Ruth believed that it would be a tipping point for the country’s broken food system. She set out to report on the farmers, ranchers, and chefs who were impacted by the pandemic, reaching across political and social divides in order to capture what she thought would be a reckoning within the food industry.

Among the documentary participants, we meet a Georgian rancher running a regenerative farm, an ocean farmer looking for “ecological redemption”, and an activist farming lands in the South Bronx in order to provide fresh produce to her community. Their stories pieced together a bleak portrait of America’s food systems: a meatpacking monopoly has small farmers in a chokehold, immigrants are exploited for their labour, and communities of color are victims of food apartheid.

This system was already unsustainable before the global pandemic; COVID-19 only exacerbated the struggles of the participants. A large portion of the documentary footage was captured in real time, taking place over Zoom calls. Participants were candid about their anxieties and fears, their struggles to keep their businesses afloat while taking care of their staff. At the same time, they demonstrated creative problem-solving, immense resilience, and hope amidst the uncertainty.

Ultimately, Food and Country is in equal parts a warning against America’s policy of producing cheap food and a celebration of the innovators who are risking everything to transform our broken food system. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to gain further insight into the food industry, to be inspired by the incredible work that is being done, and to be ignited into action for all that’s left to do.

Food and Ruth Reichl

They say never meet your heroes, but I am so glad that we were able to participate in a Q&A with Ruth and Laura after the screening. Two questions to Ruth stuck out to me in particular, which I will attempt to paraphrase here.

1. You mentioned that you regret focusing so much on the deliciousness of food over the broken systems that surround it. How do you reconcile that hindsight with the current food media landscape?

2. We’ve seen that food is a political and social issue, but we’ve also seen its power to bring people together. In an election year where the media is particularly divisive, how do you think we can use food to unite people?