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Overeating But Still Starving
If you intended to make a revolution, your main long-term strategy ought to be to transform the production system. On a smaller scale, you can make your own personal revolution changing the way you eat. Innovating, poingnant films can only be made after attaining control of the production process, as it ocurs on the overall artistic sphere. Coming from very different backgrounds, the panelists found an at first unlikely intersection point between food and filmmaking in the tension between industrialised production and independent efforts.
Carlo Petrini, the edgy Italian who founded the Slow Food Movement, denounces the “altair of profit on which all creativity is sacrified. When gastronomy is commodified through a folkloric, artificial approach, it loses its significance as a conveyor of the dignity, identity and culture of peoples. According to Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse – a natural food restaurant in California – and a supporter of small-scale farming, “we’re eating the idea of fast, cheap and easy. The entertainment industry feeds this idea to its customers (all of us), seducing us into the comfort of not having to think.
Physicist, activist and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva argues this to be one of the impoverishing consequences of biotechnology – it supposedly helps farmers by eliminating the need to know their land and take their own decisions. Thus, it destroys local knowledge built over centuries, subduing all decision-making to the efective rulers within the system, namely transnational corporations and the WTO (World Trade Organization). Having no access to the media, farmers lack of a voice against these monster institutions. It is up to young directors to address these issues; but to do that, they must deal with their own dependence first.
In a wonderful 1980 short, Werner Herzog not only eats his own shoe at Chez Panisse, but also calls for a holy war against television and recommends burglary as a fundraising strategy for film. Marginality, illegality, piracy... are not these the sole possible strategies for many third-world filmmakers? Dr. Shiva points out that most Indian people “live the indie way, that is, they survive with informal jobs, relegated to the outskirts of the system which they unknowingly support. Agriculture, the quintessential human labour, so dignified in other cultures, has now been assimilated within the profit-worshipping scheme, pushing farmers out of their land and their traditions, into a life of mind-numbing television in the slums of a big city.
In this situation, independent film, slow food, and small-scale farming, are means to raise awareness of pressing political issues. As a member of the audience commented, we are not only overeating on food – the industrial system depends on wasted production, and consequently thrives on consumerism. In art as in food, this means: grow your local ingredients, work out your own nourishing recipe, act ethically, and stop putting out so much rubbish.
Maria Antonia Velez-Serna