In the 62-minute 2012 documentary “Eating Alabama: A Story About
Why Food Matters,” 35-year old Andrew Grace and his wife Rashmi return to rural
Alabama and try to see if, as proof of a sustainability concept, it is possible to live off the land and eat
only what is produced locally, like their ancestors had. So this film is neither “Eating Raoul” nor “Sweet
Home Alabama”.
And there is the film “At Any Price”, reviewed here May 3,
2013, where a legal problem was presented, where Monsanto and maybe other
companies would sue farmers to kept the seeds of patented beans and then
planted them. One farmer presented in
this film had the same experience, and went bankrupt.
As the film opens, Grace is hunting, and he introduces the
idea of killing what you eat (a practice that Mark Zuckerberg has tried). He then tells the story of the past year as
flashback.
The film presents the process by which large companies have
gradually taken over agriculture, and driven out smaller farmers who don’t
produce the volume.
Grace shows how difficult it is to bake bread from scratch,
how much hustling you would have to do for all the ingredients.
There are many scenes of “Southern Comfort”, that is
cookouts and neighborly gatherings, even a rural jazz fest.
ITVS offers a video extra (5 min).
The film is shot all over Alabama. The hills and low mountains of the northeast
are shown, but most of the state looks pancake flat. In Birmingham, the film shows some urban
gardens, which have replaced older homes.
The official site is here.
The filmmaker once mentions the history of slavery. One of the farmers says something like, “We
don’t think about the meaning of our lives the way our lawyers do.”
I rented the film from Amazon.
Wikipedia attribution link for Cahaba River.
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